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From Gretna Green 
to Land's End 

A LITERARY JOURNEY IN ENGLAND 



By 
KATHARINE LEE BATES 

Professor of English Literature in Wellesley College 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 
HY KATHARINE COMAN 



NEW YORK 
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

Publishers 



r*Y of CONGRESS] 
iwu Uootes Received .' 

OCT U 190; 

Cnovnsrhf Entry 

Ocf ft ,1411 

. CUSS/I f XXc.,No. 

L COPY *■ j 



^ 



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Copyright, 1907 
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Company 

Published, October, 1907 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



TO 

MY FARING-MATES 

KATHARINE COMAN 

AND 

ANNIE BEECHER SCOVILLE 

Daffodil and furze and wheat, 
Shining pat/is for truant feet ; 
From that golden blossoming 
Wilted sprays are all I bring. 
You who know their fault the best, 
To their fault be tenderest, 
For a breath of fragrant days 
Whispers you from wilted sprays. 



" Some Shires, Joseph-like, have a better coloured 
coat than others; and some, with Benjamin, have 
a more bountiful mess of meat belonging to them. 
Yet every County hath a child^s proportion.'''' 

Thomas Fuller. 



PT^HESE summer wanderings through the 

west of England were undertaken at the 

request of The Chautauquan, from whose pages 

the bulk of this material is reprinted. But 

the chronicle of this recent journey has been 

supplemented, as the text indicates, by earlier 

memories. 

K. L. B. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 

The Border ■*• 

The Lake Country &0 

Three Rush-Bearings 52 

A Group of Industrial Counties 76 

The Heart of England — Warwickshire . . 137 

The Cotswolds • • 1°'* 

Oxford ^9 

Counties of the Severn Valley 230 

Somerset and Devonshire 298 

Cornwall 350 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FROM ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS 

Wordsworth's Home at Cockermouth . . . Frontispiece 

P.-VGK 

King Edward's Tower, Lanercost Abbey .... 26 

Island in Grasmere Lake 44 

The Rush-Bearing at Grasmere 60 

The Quadrant, Liverpool 78 

The Trent and Mersey Canal 90 

In the Potteries — A Child-Mother 128 

Feeding the Peacocks at Warwick Castle . . . . 160 

Wilmcote, the Birthplace of Shakespeare's Mother . 166 

Charlecote Park Entrance 170 

Tower of Chipping Campden Church 188 

The Rollright Stones 192 

The Tower, Magdalen College 210 

The Severn below the Quarry, Shrewsbury . . . 232 

Wigmore Abbey — Gate House and Barn .... 262 

Tewkesbury Abbey 282 

St. Peter's Church, Clevedon 320 

xi 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

A Devon Cottage 334< 

The Fal 340 

Church of St. Columb Minor 360 

Arthur's Castle, Tintagel 364- 

Boscastle 368 

The Lizard Light, Cornwall 372 

Land's End 376 



Xll 



From Gretna Green to 
Land's End 

THE BORDER 

THE dominant interest of the north- 
western counties is, of course, the 
Lake District, with its far-famed poetic 
associations; yet for the student of English 
history and the lover of Border minstrelsy 
the upper strip of Cumberland has a strong 
attraction of its own. 

An afternoon run on the Midland brought 
us from Liverpool to Carlisle. Such are the 
eccentricities of the English railway system 
that the "through carriage" into which guard 
and porter dumped us at Liverpool, a third- 
class carriage already crowded with one sleep- 
ing and one eating family, turned out not to 
be a through carriage at all; and a new guard, 
at Hellifield, tore us and our belongings forth 
and thrust us into an empty first-class, linger- 
ing in the doorway until we had produced the 
inevitable shilling. But the freedom of an 
empty carriage would have been well worth 
' i 1 



THE BORDER 

the honest price of first-class tickets, for as the 
train sped on from the Ribble into the Eden 
Valley, with the blue heights of the Pennine 
range and the long reaches of the Yorkshire 
moors on our right, and on our left the 
cloud- caressed summits of Lakeland, we 
needed all the space there was for our ex- 
ultant ohs and ahs, not to mention our con- 
tinual rushing from window to window for 
the swiftly vanishing views of grey castle and 
ruined abbey, peel tower and stone sheep- 
fold, grange and hamlet, and the exquisite, 
ever-changing panorama of the mist. 

Carlisle, "the Border City," a clean, self- 
respecting, serious town, without beggars, 
with no superfluous street courtesies, but with 
effectual aid in need, is the heart of one of the 
most storied regions of England. The River 
Drift man and the Cave man seem to have 
fought the mammoth and the elk and gone 
their shadowy way untraced in this locality, 
but the museum in Tullie House contains 
hammers and axes, found in Cumberland soil, 
of the Stone Age, and spear-heads and arrow- 
heads, urns for human ashes, incense cups, 
food vessels and drinking vessels of the Bronze 
Age, — mute memorials of life that once was 

2 



THE BORDER 

lived so eagerly beneath these same soft, 
brooding skies. 

As for the Romans, they seem here like a 
race of yesterday. A penny tram took us, 
in the clear, quiet light of what at home would 
be the middle of the evening, out to Stanwix, 
originally, it is believed, an important station 
in the series of fortresses that guarded the 
northern boundary of Roman Britain. These 
frontier lines consisted of a great stone wall, 
eight feet thick and eighteen feet high, ditched 
and set with forts and towers, running straight 
from the Solway to the Tyne, a distance of 
some seventy- three miles, and a little to the 
south of this, what is known as the vallum, 
a fosse with mounds of soil and rock on either 
side. The local antiquaries, urged on by a 
committee of Oxford men, have recently dis- 
covered a third wall, built of sods, between 
the two, and excavation and discussion have 
received a fresh impetus. Was the vallum 
built by Agricola, — earthworks thrown up 
by that adventurous general of the first Chris- 
tian century to secure his conquest? Was 
the turf wall the erection of the great emperor 
Hadrian, who visited Britain in the year 120, 
and was the huge stone rampart constructed, 

3 



THE BORDEfe 

early in the third century, by the Emperor 
Severus? Or does the stone wall date from 
Hadrian? Or did he build all three? 

While the scholars literally dig for truth, 
we may sit on the site of this mighty, well- 
nigh perished bulwark at Stanwix, with what 
is perhaps the wrinkle left on the landscape 
by the wall's deep moat dropping, under a 
screen of hawthorns and wind- silvered pop- 
lars, sheer at our feet, and thence we may look 
out across the Eden, with its dipping gulls 
and sailing swans, its hurrying swifts and 
little dancing eddy, to the heights of Carlisle. 
For the city is built on a natural eminence 
almost encircled by the Eden and its tribu- 
taries, the Petteril and the Caldew. It is a 
fine view even now, with the level light cen- 
tred on the red sandstone walls of the grim 
castle, though factory chimneys push into 
the upper air, overtopping both the castle and 
its grave neighbour, the cathedral; but for 
mass and dignity, for significance, these two 
are unapproachable: these are Carlisle. 

We must not see them yet. We must see a 
lonely bluff set over with the round clay huts of 
the Britons, and then, as the Roman legions 
sweep these like so many mole-hills from their 

4 



THE BORDER 

path, we must see in gradual growth a Roman 
town, — not luxurious, with the tessellated 
marble pavements and elaborate baths that 
have left their splendid fragments farther 
south, but a busy trading-point serving the 
needs of that frontier line of garrisons which 
numbered no less than fifteen thousand men. 
Some few inscribed and sculptured stones, 
remnants of altars, tombs, and the like, may 
be seen in the museum, with lamps, dishes, 
and other specimens of such coarse and simple 
pottery as was in daily use by common Roman 
folk when the days and the nights were 
theirs. 

The name Carlisle — and it is said to be 
the only city of England which bears a purely 
British name — was originally Caer Lywelydd, 
British enough in very sooth. This the Ro- 
mans altered to Lugubalia, and when, in 
409, the garrisons of the Wall were recalled 
for the protection of Rome herself, the Britons 
of the neighbourhood made it their centre, and 
it passed into Arthurian tradition as Cardueil. 
Even the ballads vaguely sing of a time 
when 

"King Arthur lived in Merry Carlisle 
And seemly was to see." 
5 



THE BORDER 

But although the Britons sometimes united, 
under one hero or a succession of heroes, to 
save the land, now abandoned by the Romans, 
from the Saxons, they were often at war 
among themselves, and the headship of their 
northern confederacy was wrested from Car- 
lisle and transferred to Dumbarton on the 
Clyde. The kingdom of the Cumbrian 
Britons, thenceforth known as Strathclyde, 
fell before the assault of the English king- 
dom of Northumbria, in which the Christian 
faith had taken deep root. For though the 
Britons, in the fourth century of Roman rule, 
had accepted Christianity, the Angles had 
come in with their own gods, and a new con- 
version of the north, effected by missionaries 
from Iona, took place about the sixth century. 
Sculptured crosses of this period still remain 
in Cumberland and Westmoreland, and the 
Carlisle museum preserves, in Runic letters, 
a Christian epitaph of "Cimokom, Alh's 
queen." 

"Holy into ruin she went," 

is the eloquent record, and from her grave- 
mound she utters the new hope: 



THE BORDER 

"My body the all-loving Christ 
Young again shall renew after death, 
But indeed sorrowing tear-flow 
Never shall afflict me more." 

For a moment the mists that have gathered 
about the shelving rock to which we are look- 
ing not merely across the Eden, but across 
the river of time, divide and reveal the figure 
of Cuthbert, the great monk of Northumbria, 
to whom King Egfrith had committed the 
charge of his newly founded monastery at 
Caerluel. The Venerable Bede tells how, 
while the king had gone up into Scotland on 
a daring expedition against the Picts, in 685, 
Cuthbert visited the city, whose officials, for 
his better entertainment, took him to view 
a Roman fountain of choice workmanship. 
But he stood beside its carven rim with ab- 
sent look, leaning on his staff, and mur- 
mured: "Perchance even now the conflict is 
decided." And so it was, to the downfall 
of Egfrith's power and the confusion of the 
north. After the ravaging Scots and Picts 
came the piratical Danes, and, about 875, 
what was left of Carlisle went up in flame. A 
rusted sword or two in the museum tells the 
fierce story of the Danish sack. At the end 

7 



THE BORDER 

of the tenth century Cumberland was ceded 
to Scotland, but was recovered by William 
Rufus, son of William the Conqueror. Car- 
lisle, the only city added to England since the 
Norman conquest, was then a heap of ruins; 
but in 1092, says the "Anglo-Saxon Chroni- 
cle," the king "went northward with a great 
army, and set up the wall of Carluel, and 
reared the castle." 
No longer 

"The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall," 

but there is still the castle, which even the 
most precipitate tourist does not fail to visit. 
We went in one of those wild blusters of wind 
and rain which are rightly characteristic of 
this city of tempestuous history, and had to 
cling to the battlements to keep our footing 
on the rampart walk. We peeped out through 
the long slits of the loop-holes, but saw no 
more formidable enemies than storm-clouds 
rising from the north. The situation was un- 
favourable to historic reminiscence, nor did 
the blatant guide below, who hammered our 
ears with items of dubious information, help 
us to a realisation of the castle's robust career. 
Yet for those who have eyes to read, the stones 

8 



THE BORDER 

of these stern towers are a chronicle of an- 
cient reigns and furious wars, dare-devil ad- 
ventures and piteous tragedy. 

The Norman fortress seems to have been 
reared upon the site of a Roman stronghold, 
whose walls and conduits are still traceable. 
After William Rufus came other royal build- 
ers, notably Edward I and Richard III. It 
was in the reign of the first Edward that Car- 
lisle won royal favour by a spirited defence 
against her Scottish neighbours, the men of 
Annandale, who, forty thousand strong, 
marcheH red-handed across the Border. A 
Scottish spy within the city set it on fire, but 
while the men of Carlisle fought the flames, 
the women scrambled to the walls and, roll- 
ing down stones on the assailants and shower- 
ing them with boiling water, kept them off 
until an ingenious burgher, venturing out on 
the platform above the gate, fished up, with 
a stout hook, the leader of the besiegers and 
held him high in the air while lances and 
arrows pierced him through and through. 
This irregular mode of warfare was too much 
for the men of Annandale, who marched 
home in disgust. 

During Edward's wars against Wallace 
9 



THE BORDER 

he made Carlisle his headquarters. Twice 
he held Parliaments there, and it was from 
Carlisle he set forth, a dying king, on his last 
expedition against the Scots. In four days 
he had ridden but six miles, and then breath 
left the exhausted body. His death was kept 
secret until his son could reach Carlisle, which 
witnessed, in that eventful July of 1307, a 
solemn gathering of the barons of England to 
mourn above the bier of their great war-lord 
and pay their homage to the ill-starred Ed- 
ward II. A quarter century later, Lord 
Dacre, then captain of Carlisle Castle, opened 
its gates to a royal fugitive from Scotland, 
Balliol; and Edward III, taking up the cause 
of the rejected sovereign, made war, from Car- 
lisle as his headquarters, on the Scots. After 
the Wars of the Roses, Edward IV com- 
mitted the north of England to the charge of 
his brother Gloucester, who bore the titles 
of Lord Warden of the Marches and Captain 
of Carlisle Castle. Monster though tradi- 
tion has made him, Richard III seems to 
have had a sense of beauty, for Richard's 
Tower still shows mouldings and other or- 
namental touches unusual in the northern 
architecture of the period. 

10 



THE BORDER 

But the royal memory which most of all 
casts a glamour over Carlisle Castle is that 
of Mary, Queen of Scots. Fleeing from her 
own subjects, she came to England, in 1568, 
a self-invited guest. She landed from a 
fishing- boat at Workington, on the Cumber- k 
land coast, — a decisive moment which 
Wordsworth has crystallised in a sonnet: 

"Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed, 
The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore; 
And to the throng, that on the Cumbrian shore 
Her landing hailed, how touchingly she bowed! 
And like a star (that, from a heavy cloud 
Of pine-tree foliage poised in air, forth darts, 
When a soft summer gale at evening parts 
The gloom that did its loveliness enshroud) 
She smiled; but Time, the old Saturnian seer, 
Sighed on the wing as her foot pressed the strand 
With step prelusive to a long array 
Of woes and degradations hand in hand — 
Weeping captivity, and shuddering fear 
Stilled by the ensanguined block of Fotheringay!" 

Mary was escorted with all courtesy to 
Cockermouth Castle and thence to Carlisle, 
where hospitality soon became imprison- 
ment. Her first request of Elizabeth was for 
clothing, and it was in one of the deep- walled 
rooms of Queen Mary's Tower, of which 
only the gateway now remains, that she im- 

11 



THE BORDER 

patiently looked on while her ladies opened 
Elizabeth's packet to find — " two torn shifts, 
two pieces of black velvet, and two pairs of 
shoes." The parsimony of Queen Bess has 
a curious echo in the words of Sir Francis 
Knollys, who, set to keep this disquieting 
guest under close surveillance, was much 
concerned when she took to sending to Edin- 
burgh for "coffers of apparell," especially 
as she did not pay the messengers, so that 
Elizabeth, after all, was "like to bear the 
charges" of Mary's vanity. The captive 
queen was allowed a semblance of freedom 
in Carlisle. She walked the terrace of the 
outer ward of the castle, went to service in 
the cathedral, and sometimes, with her ladies, 
strolled in the meadows beside the Eden, or 
watched her gentlemen play a game of foot- 
ball, or even hunted the hare, although her 
warders were in a fever of anxiety whenever 
she was on horseback lest she should take it 
into her wilful, beautiful head to gallop back 
to Scotland. 

But these frowning towers have more terri- 
ble records of captivity. Under the old Nor- 
man keep are hideous black vaults, with the 
narrowest of slits for the admission of air and 

12 



THE BORDER 

with the walls still showing the rivet-holes 
of the chains by which the hapless prisoners 
were so heavily fettered. 

"Full fifteen stane o' Spanish iron 
They hae laid a'right sair on me; 
Wi' locks and keys I am fast bound 
Into this dungeon dark and dreerie." 

Rude devices, supposed to be the pastime 
of captives, are carved upon the walls of a 
mural chamber, — a chamber which has 
special significance for the reader of " Waver - 
ley," as here, it is said, Major Macdonald, 
the original of Fergus Maclvor, was confined. 
For Carlisle Castle was never more cruel than 
to the Jacobites of 1745. On November 18 
Bonny Prince Charlie, preceded by one hun- 
dred Highland pipers, had made triumphal 
entrance into the surrendered city, through 
which he passed again, on the 21st of De- 
cember, in retreat. Carlisle was speedily re- 
taken by the English troops, and its garrison, 
including Jemmy Dawson of Jacobite song, 
sent in ignominy to London. Even so the 
cells of the castle were crammed with prison- 
ers, mainly Scots, who were borne to death 
in batches. Pinioned in the castle courtyard, 
seated on black hurdles drawn by white horses, 

13 



THE BORDER 

with the executioner, axe in hand, crouching 
behind, they were drawn, to make a Carlisle 
holiday, under the gloomy arch of the castle 
gate, through the thronged and staring street, 
and along the London road to Harraby Hill, 
where they suffered, one after another, the 
barbarous penalty for high treason. The 
ghastly heads were set up on pikes over the 
castle gates (yetts), as Scotch balladry well 
remembers. 

"White was the rose in his gay bonnet, 
As he folded me in his broached plaidie; 
His hand, which clasped mine i' the truth o' luve, 
O it was aye in battle ready. 
His lang, lang hair in yellow hanks 
Waved o'er his cheeks sae sweet and ruddy, 
But now they wave o'er Carlisle yetts 
In dripping ringlets clotting bloodie. 
My father's blood's in that flower tap, 
My brother's in that hare-bell's blossom; 
This white rose was steeped in my luve's blude, 
And I'll aye wear it in my bosom. 

"When I cam' first by merrie Carlisle, 
Was ne'er a town sae sweetly seeming; 
The white rose flaunted o'er the wall, 
The thistled banners far were streaming! 
When I cam' next by merrie Carlisle, 
O sad, sad seemed the town, and eerie! 
The auld, auld men came out and wept — 
O, maiden, come ye to seek yer dearie ?" 
14 



THE BORDER 

But not all the ballads of Carlisle Castle 
are tragic. Blithe enough is the one that tells 
how the Lochmaben harper outwitted the 
warden, who, when the minstrel, mounted 
on a grey mare, rode up to the castle gate, 
invited him in to ply his craft. 

"Then aye he harped, and aye he carped, 
Till a' the lordlings footed the floor; 
But an the music was sae sweet, 

The groom had nae mind o' the stable door. 

"And aye he harped, and aye he carped, 
Till a' the nobles were fast asleep; 
Then quickly he took off his shoon, 
And softly down the stair did creep." 

So he stole into the stable and slipped a 
halter over the nose of a fine brown stallion 
belonging to the warden and tied it to the grey 
mare's tail. Then he turned them loose, and 
she who had a foal at home would not once 
let the brown horse bait, 

"But kept him a-galloping home to her foal." 

When the loss of the two horses was dis- 
covered in the morning, the harper made 
such ado that the warden paid him three 
times over for the grey mare. 

15 



THE BORDER 

"And verra gude business," commented 
our Scotch landlady. 

The most famous of the Carlisle Castle 
ballads relates the rescue of Kinmont Willie, 
a high-handed cattle- thief of the Border. For 
between the recognised English and Scottish 
boundaries lay a strip of so-called Debatable 
Land, whose settlers, known as the Bata- 
bles, owed allegiance to neither country, 
but 

"Sought the beeves, that made their broth, 
In Scotland and in England both." 

This Border was a natural shelter for out- 
laws, refugees, and "broken men" in general, 
— reckless fellows who loved the wildness 
and peril of the life, men of the type depicted 
in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel." 

"A stark moss-trooping Scot was he, 
As e'er couched Border lance by knee: 
Through Solway sands, through Tarras moss, 
Blindfold, he knew the paths to cross; 
By wily turns, by desperate bounds, 
Had baffled Percy's best bloodhounds; 
In Eske, or Liddel, fords were none, 
But he would ride them, one by one; 
Alike to him was time, or tide, 
December's snow or July's pride: 
16 



THE BORDER 

Alike to him was tide, or time, 

Moonless midnight, or matin prime: 

Steady of heart, and stout of hand, 

As ever drove prey from Cumberland; 

Five times outlawed had he been, 

By England's king and Scotland's queen." 

Although these picturesque plunderers cost 
the neighbourhood dear, they never failed 
of sympathy in the hour of doom. The 
Graemes, for instance, were a large clan who 
lived by rapine. In 1600, when Elizabeth's 
government compelled them to give a bond 
of surety for one another's good behaviour, 
they numbered more than four hundred 
fighting men. There was Muckle Willie, 
and Mickle Willie, and Nimble Willie, and 
many a Willie more. But the execution of 
Hughie the Graeme was none the less 
grievous. 

"Gude Lord Scroope's to the hunting gane, 

He has ridden o'er moss and muir; 
And he has grippit Hughie the Graeme, 

For stealing o' the Bishop's mare. 



"Then they have grippit Hughie the Graeme, 
And brought him up through Carlisle toun; 

The lasses and lads stood on the walls, 

Crying, 'Hughie the Graeme, thou 'se ne'er gae doun.' " 
2 17 



THE BORDER 
They tried him by a jury of men, 

"The best that were in Carlisle toun," 

and although his guilt was open, "gude Lord 
Hume" offered the judge "twenty white 
owsen" to let him off, and "gude lady Hume " 
"a peck of white pennies," but it was of no 
avail, and Hughie went gallantly to his death. 
For these Batables had their own code of 
right and wrong, and were, in their peculiar 
way, men of honour. There was Hobbie 
Noble, an English outlaw, who was betrayed 
by a comrade for English gold, and who, 
hanged at Carlisle, expressed on the gallows 
his execration of such conduct. 

"I wad hae betray 'd nae lad alive, 
For a' the gowd o' Christentie." 

The seizure of Kinmont Willie was hotly 
resented, even though his clan, the Arm- 
strongs, who had built themselves strong 
towers on the Debatable Land, "robbed, 
spoiled, burned and murdered," as the 
Warden of the West Marches complained, 
all along upper Cumberland. The Arm- 
strongs could, at one time, muster out over 
three thousand horsemen, and Dacres and 

18 



THE BORDER 

Howards strove in vain to bring them under 
control. Yet there was "Border law," too, 
one of its provisions being that on the ap- 
pointed days of truce, when the "Lord 
Wardens of England and Scotland, and Scot- 
land and England" met, each attended by a 
numerous retinue, at a midway cairn, to hear 
complaints from either side and administer 
a rude sort of justice in accordance with " the 
laws of the Marches," no man present, not 
even the most notorious freebooter, could be 
arrested. But William Armstrong of Kin- 
mont was too great a temptation; he had 
harried Cumberland too long; and a troop 
of some two hundred English stole after him, 
as he rode off carelessly along the Liddel 
bank, when the assemblage broke up, over- 
powered him, and brought him in bonds to 
Carlisle. 

"O have ye na heard o' the fause Sakelde? 

O have ye na heard o' the keen Lord Scroope ? 
How they hae ta'en bauld Kinmont Willie, 
On Haribee to hang him up ? 



'They led him through the Liddel rack 
And also through the Carlisle sands; 
They brought him to Carlisle castle, 

To be at my Lord Scroope's commands." 
19 



4 



THE BORDER 

But this was more than the Scottish war- 
den, Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, could 
bear. 

"And have they ta'en him, Kinmont Willie, 
Against the truce of the Border tide, 
And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch 
Is Keeper on the Scottish side ? 

"And have they ta'en him, Kinmont Willie, 
Withouten either dread or fear, 
And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch 
Can back a steed or shake a spear ? 

"O! were there war between the lands, 
As well I wot that there is nane, 
I would slight Carlisle castle high 

Though it were builded of marble stane. 

"I would set that castle in a low 1 
And sloken it with English blood; 
There's never a man in Cumberland 
Should ken where Carlisle Castle stood. 

"But since nae war's between the lands, 
And there is peace, and peace should be, 
I'll neither harm English lad or lass, 
And yet the Kinmont freed shall be." 

So Buccleuch rode out, one dark night, 
with a small party of Borderers, and suc- 
ceeded, aided by one of the gusty storms of 

1 Blaze. 

20 



THE BORDER 

the region, in making his way to Carlisle 
undetected. 

"And when we left the Staneshaw-bank, 
The wind began full loud to blaw; 
But 't was wind and weet, and fire and sleet, 
When we came beneath the castle wa'." 

The sudden uproar raised by the little band 
bewildered the garrison, and to Kinmont 
Willie, heavily ironed in the inner dungeon 
and expecting death in the ruorning, came 
the voices of friends. 

"Wi' coulters, and wi' forehammers, 
We garr'd x the bars bang merrilie, 
Until we cam' to the inner prison, 
Where Willie o' Kinmont he did lie. 

"And when we cam' to the lower prison, 
Where Willie o' Kinmont he did lie: 
'O sleep ye, wake ye, Kinmont Willie, 
Upon the morn that thou's to die?' 

"'OI sleep saft, and I wake aft; 

It's lang since sleeping was flcy'd frae me! 
Gie my service back to my wife and bairns, 
And a' gude fellows that spier 2 for me.'" 

But his spirits rose to the occasion, and when 
Red Rowan, 

"The starkest man in Teviotdale," 

1 Made. * Inquire. 

21 



THE BORDER 

hoisted Kinmont Willie, whose fetters there 
was no time to knock off, on his back and 
carried him up to the breach they had made 
in the wall, from which they went down by 
a ladder they had brought with them, the man 
so narrowly delivered from the noose had his 
jest ready: 

"Then shoulder-high with shout and cry 
We bore him down the ladder lang; 
At every stride Red Rowan made 

I wot the Kinmont's aims 1 play'd clang. 

"'O mony a time,' quo' Kinmont Willie, 

'I have ridden horse baith wild and wood. 2 
But a rougher beast than Red Rowan 
I ween my legs have ne'er bestrode. 

"'And mony a time,' quo' Kinmont Willie, 
'I've pricked a horse out owre the furse, 
But since the day I back'd a steed, 
I never wore sic cumbrous spurs.'" 

It is high time that we, too, escaped from 
Carlisle Castle into the open-air delights of 
the surrounding country. Five miles to the 
east lies the pleasant village of Wetheral on 
the Eden. Corby Castle, seat of a branch of 
the great Howard family, crowns the wooded 

1 Irons. 2 Mac }. 

22 



THE BORDER 

hill across the river, but we lingered in Wethe- 
ral Church for the sake of one who may have 
been an ancestor of "the fause Sakelde." 
This stately sleeper is described as Sir Richard 
Salkeld, "Captain and Keeper of Carlisle," 
who, at about the time of Henry VII, " in this 
land was mickle of might." His effigy is 
sadly battered; both arms are gone, a part 
of a leg, and the whole body is marred and 
dinted, with latter-day initials profanely 
scrawled upon it. But he, lying on the out- 
side, has taken the brunt of abuse and, like 
a chivalrous lord, protected Dame Jane, his 
lady, whose alabaster gown still falls in even 
folds. 

We drove eastward ten miles farther, under 
sun and shower, now by broad meadows 
where sleek kine, secure at last from cattle- 
lifters, were tranquilly grazing, now by solemn 
ranks of Scotch firs and far-reaching parks 
of smooth-barked, muscular beeches, now 
through stone- paved hamlets above whose 
shop- doors we would read the familiar ballad 
names, Scott, Graham (Graeme), Armstrong, 
Musgrave, Johnston, Kerr, and wonder how 
the wild blood of the Border had been tamed 
to the selling of picture postal cards. 

23 



THE BORDER 

Our goal was Naworth, one of the most 
romantic of English castles. Its two great 
towers, as we approached, called imagination 
back to the days 

"When, from beneath the greenwood tree, 
Rode forth Lord Howard's chivalry, 

And minstrels, as they marched in order, 

Played, 'Noble Lord Dacre, he dwells on the Border.'" 

Naworth is the heart of a luxuriant valley. 
The position owes its defensive strength to 
the gorges cut by the Irthing and two tribu- 
taries. These three streams, when supple- 
mented by the old moat, made Naworth an 
island fortress. The seat of the Earls of Car- 
lisle, it was built by Ranulph Dacre in the 
fourteenth century. Even the present Lady 
Carlisle, a pronounced Liberal and a vigorous 
worker in the causes of Temperance and 
Woman Suffrage, though claiming to be a 
more thoroughgoing Republican than any 
of us in the United States, points out with 
something akin to pride "the stone man" on 
the Dacre Tower who has upheld the family 
escutcheon there for a little matter of five 
hundred years. In the sixteenth century the 
Dacre lands passed by marriage to the How- 

24 



THE BORDER 

ards, and "Belted Will," as Sir Walter Scott 
dubbed Lord William Howard, proved, under 
Elizabeth and James, an efficient agent of 
law and order. Two suits of his plate armour 
still bear witness to the warrior, whom the 
people called "Bauld Willie," with the same 
homely directness that named his wife, in 
recognition of the ample dower she brought 
him, "Bessie with the braid apron," but his 
tastes were scholarly and his disposition de- 
vout. Lord William's Tower, with its rugged 
stone walls, its loopholes and battlements, 
its steep and narrow winding-stair guarded 
by a massive iron door, its secret passage to 
the dungeons, is feudal enough in suggestion, 
yet here may be seen his library with the oak- 
panelled roof and the great case of tempting 
old folios, and here his oratory, with its fine 
wood- carvings, its Flemish altar-piece, and 
its deep- windowed recess outlooking on a fair 
expanse of green earth and silver sky. 

This castle, with its magnificent baronial 
hall, its treasures of art and spirit of frank 
hospitality, was harder to escape from than 
Carlisle. There was no time to follow the 
Irthing eastward to the point where, as the 
Popping Stones tell, Walter Scott offered his 

25 



THE BORDER 

warm heart and honest hand to the dark- eyed 
daughter of a French emigre. But we could 
not miss Lanercost, the beautiful ruined 
abbey lying about a mile to the north of Na- 
worth. An Augustine foundation of the 
twelfth century, it has its memories of Ed- 
ward I, who visited it with Queen Eleanor 
in 1180 and came again in broken health, six 
years later, to spend quietly in King Edward's 
Tower the last winter of his life. The nave 
now makes a noble parish church in which 
windows by William Morris and Burne- 
Jones glow like jewels. The choir is roof- 
less, but gracious in its ruin, its pavement 
greened by moss, feathery grasses waving 
from its lofty arcades, and its walls weathered 
to all pensive, tender tints. The ancient 
tombs, most of them bearing the scallop- 
shells of the Dacres, are rich in sculpture. 
Into the transept walls are built some square 
grey stones of the Roman Wall, and a Roman 
altar forms a part of the clerestory roof. The 
crypt, too, contains several Roman altars, 
dedicated to different gods whose figures, 
after the lapse of two thousand years, are 
startling in their spirited grace, their energy 
of life. 

26 




king edward's tower, lanercost abbey 



THE BORDER 

But Lanercost reminds us that we have all 
but ignored Carlisle Cathedral, and back we 
drive, by way of the village of Brampton with 
its curious old market-hall, to the Border 
City. After all, we have only followed the 
custom of the place in slighting the cathedral. 
Carlisle was ever too busy fighting to pay 
much heed to formal worship. 

"For mass or prayer can I rarely tarry, 
Save to patter an Ave Mary 
When I ride on a Border foray." 

The cathedral dates from the time of Wil- 
liam Rufus, and still retains two bays of its 
Norman nave, which suffered from fire in 
the early part of the thirteenth century. A 
still more disastrous fire, toward the close of 
that century, all but destroyed the new choir, 
which it took the preoccupied citizens one 
hundred years to rebuild, so that we see to- 
day Early English arches in combination with 
Decorated pillars and Late Decorated capitals. 
These capitals of fresh and piquant designs 
are an especial feature of the choir, whose 
prime glory, however, is the great east window 
with its perfect tracery, although only the 
upper glass is old. The cathedral has suf- 

27 



THE BORDER 

fered not alone from a series of fires, but from 
military desecration. Part of its nave was 
pulled down by the irreverent Roundheads 
to repair the fortifications, and it was used 
after Carlisle was retaken from Prince Charlie 
as a prison for the garrison. Even to-day 
canny Cumberland shows a grain too much 
of frugality in pasturing sheep in the cathe- 
dral graveyard. Carlisle Cathedral has num- 
bered among its archdeacons Paley of the 
"Evidences," and among its archdeans Percy 
of the "Reliques." Among its bridegrooms 
was Walter Scott, who wedded here his raven- 
haired lady of the Popping Stones. 

One drive more before we seek the Lake 
Country, — ten miles to the north, this time, 
across the adventurous Esk, where a fierce 
wind seemed to carry in it the shout of old 
slogans and the clash and clang of arms, and 
across the boundary stream, the Sark, to 
Gretna Green, where breathless couples used 
to be married by blacksmith or innkeeper 
or the first man they met, the furious parents 
posting after all in vain. Then around by 
Longtown we drove and back to Carlisle, 
across the Sol way Moss, — reaches of blow- 
ing grass in the foreground; dark, broken 

28 



THE BORDER 

bogs, where men and women were gathering 
in the peat, in the middle distance; and be- 
yond, the blue folds of hills on hills. It was 
already evening, but such was the witchery 
of the scene, still with something eerie and 
lawless about it despite an occasional farm- 
house with stuffed barns and plump ricks and 
meadows of unmolested kine, that we would 
gladly, like the old Borderers whose armorial 
bearings so frequently included stars and 
crescents, have spent the night in that De- 
batable Land, with the moon for our accom- 
plice in moss- trooping. 



29 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

THERE are as many "best ways" of 
making the tour of this enchanted land 
as there are Lake Country guidebooks, 
volumes which, at prices varying from ten 
shillings to "tuppence," are everywhere in 
evidence. One may journey by rail to Kes- 
wick or to Windermere; one may come up 
from Furness Abbey to Lakeside, passing 
gradually from the softer scenery to the wilder; 
or one may enter by way of Penrith and Pooley 
Bridge, ushered at once into the presence of 
some of the noblest mountains and perhaps 
the loveliest lake. 

This last was our route, and very satis- 
factory we found it. Our stay at Penrith 
had been abbreviated by a municipal coun- 
cillors' convention which left not a bed for 
the stranger. We had been forewarned of 
the religious convention which throngs Kes- 
wick the last full week in July, and, indeed, 
an evangelist bound thither had presented 

30 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

us with tracts as we took our train at Carlisle. 
But we had not reckoned on finding Penrith 
in such plethoric condition, and, after an up- 
hill look at the broken red walls of Penrith 
Castle, which, with Carlisle, Naworth, and 
Cockermouth, stood for the defence of western 
England against the Scots, we mounted a 
motor-bus, of all atrocities, and were banged 
and clanged along a few miles of fairly level 
road which transferred us, as we crossed the 
Eamont, from Cumberland to Westmore- 
land. The hamlet of Pooley Bridge lies 
at the lower end of Ullswater, up whose 
mountain-hemmed reaches of ever-heighten- 
ing beauty we were borne by The Raven, a 
leisurely little steamer with a ruddy captain 
serenely assured that his lake is the queen of 
all. The evening was cold and gusty, — 
rougher weather than any we had encoun- 
tered in our midsummer voyage across the 
Atlantic, — but, wrapped in our rugs and 
shedding hairpins down the wind, we could 
have sailed on forever, so glorious was that 
sunset vision of great hills almost bending over 
the riverlike lake that runs on joyously, as from 
friend to friend, between the guardian ranks. 
We lingered for a few days at the head of 
31 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

Ullswater, in Patterdale, and would gladly 
have lingered longer, if only to watch the play 
of light and shadow over St. Sunday Crag, 
Place Fell, Stybarrow Crag, Fairfield, and all 
that shouldering brotherhood of giants, but 
we must needs take advantage of the first 
clear day for the coach- drive to Ambleside, 
over the Kirks tone Pass, 

" Aspiring Road! that lov'st to hide 
Thy daring in a vapoury bourn." 

A week at Ambleside, under Wansfell's 
"visionary majesties of light," went all too 
swiftly in the eager exploration of Grasmere 
and Coniston, Hawkshead, Bowness, Winder- 
mere, and those "lofty brethren," the Lang- 
dale Pikes, with their famous rock-walled 
cascade, Dungeon Ghyll. The coach- drive 
from Ambleside to Keswick carried us, at 
Dunmailraise, across again from Westmore- 
land to Cumberland. Helvellyn and Thirl- 
mere dominated the way, but Skiddaw and 
Derwent Water claimed our allegiance on 
arrival. What is counted the finest coach- 
drive in the kingdom, however, the twenty- 
four-mile circuit from Keswick known as the 
Buttermere Round, remained to bring us 

32 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

under a final subjection to the silver solitude 
of Buttermere and Crummock Water and the 
rugged menace of Honister Crag. The train 
that hurried us from Keswick to Cocker- 
mouth passed along the western shore of 
pleasant Bassenthwaite Water, but from 
Workington to Furness Abbey meres and 
tarns, for all their romantic charm, were for- 
gotten, while, the salt wind on our faces, we 
looked out, over sand and shingle, on the dim 
grey vast of ocean. 

The Lake Country, it is often said, has no 
history. The tourist need not go from point 
to point enquiring 

"If here a warrior left a spell, 
Panting for glory as he fell; 
Or here a saint expired." 

That irregular circle of the Cumberland 
Hills, varying from some forty to fifty miles 
in diameter, a compact mass whose moun- 
tain lines shut in narrow valleys, each with 
its own lake, and radiate out from Helvellyn 
in something like a starfish formation, bears, 
for all its wildness, the humanised look of 
land on which many generations of men have 
lived and died; but the records of that life 
are scant. 

3 33 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

There are several stone- circles, taken to be 
the remains of British temples, the "mystic 
Round of Druid frame," notably Long Meg 
and her Daughters, near Penrith, and the 
Druid's Circle, just out of Keswick. About 
the Keswick circle such uncanny influences 
still linger that no two persons can number 
the stones alike, nor will your own second 
count confirm your first. Storm and flood 
rage against that mysterious shrine, but the 
wizard blocks cannot be swept away. The 
Romans, who had stations near Kendal, Pen- 
rith, and Ambleside, have left some striking 
remembrances, notably " that lone Camp on 
Hardknott's height," and their proud road, 
still well defined for at least fifteen miles, 
along the top of High Street ridge. A storied 
heap of stones awaits the climber at the top of 

"The long ascent of Dunmailraise." 

Here, in 945, the last king of the Cumbrian 
Britons, Dunmail, was defeated by Edmund 
of England in the pass between Grasmere 
and Keswick. Seat Sandal and Steel Fell 
looked down from either side upon his fall. 
Edmund raised a cairn above what his Saxon 
wits supposed was a slain king, but Dunmail 

34 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

is only biding his time. His golden crown 
was hurled into Grisedale Tarn, high up in 
the range, where the shoulders of Helvellyn, 
Seat Sandal, and Fairfield touch, and on the 
last night of every year these dark warders 
see a troop of Dunmail's men rise from the 
tarn, where it is their duty to guard the crown, 
bearing one more stone to throw down upon 
the cairn. When the pile is high enough to 
content the king, who counts each year in his 
deep grave the crash of another falling stone, 
he will rise and rule again over Cumberland. 

Here history and folk-lore blend. Of pure 
folk-lore the stranger hears but little. Eden 
Hall, near Penrith, has a goblet filched from 
the fairies: 

"If e'er this glass should break or fall. 
Farewell the luck of Eden Hall." 

The enchanted rock in the Vale of St. John 
is celebrated in Scott's " Bridal of Triermain." 
St. Bees has a triumphant tradition of St. 
Bega, who, determined to be a nun, ran away 
from the Irish king, her father, for no better 
reason than because he meant to marry her 
to a Norwegian prince, and set sail in a fishing- 
boat for the Cumberland coast. Her little 

35 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

craft was driven in by the storm to White- 
haven, where she so won upon the sympathies 
of the Countess of Egremont that this lady 
besought her lord to give the fugitive land 
for a convent. It was midsummer, and the 
graceless husband made answer that he would 
give as much as the snow should lie upon next 
morning, but when he awoke and looked out 
from the castle casement, his demesne for 
three miles around was white with snow. 

Wordsworth's "Song at the Feast of 
Brougham Castle," "The Horn of Egremont 
Castle," and "The Somnambulist" relate 
three legends of the region, of varying de- 
grees of authenticity, and Lord's Island in 
Derwent Water brings to mind the right 
noble name of James Radcliffe, third and 
last Earl of Derwentwater, who declared for 
his friend and kinsman, the Pretender of 
1715. On October sixth the young earl 
bade his brave girl-wife farewell and rode 
away to join the rebels, though his favourite 
dog howled in the courtyard and his dapple- 
grey started back from the gate. On Oc- 
tober fourteenth the cause was lost, and 
the Earl of Derwentwater was among the 
seventeen hundred who surrendered at Pres- 

36 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

ton. In the Tower and again on the scaf- 
fold his life was offered him if he would 
acknowledge George I as rightful king and 
would conform to the Protestant religion, 
but he said it " would be too dear a purchase." 
On the evening after his beheading the 
Northern Lights flamed red over Keswick, 
so that they are still known in the country- 
side as Lord Derwentwater's Lights. 

The dalesfolk could doubtless tell us more. 
There may still be dwellers by Windermere 
who have heard on stormy nights the ghastly 
shrieks of the Crier of Claife, calling across 
the lake for a ferry-boat, although it was long 
ago that a valiant monk from Lady Holm 
"laid" that troubled spirit, binding it, with 
book and bell, to refrain from troubling " while 
ivy is green"; and in the depths of Borrow- 
dale, on a wild dawn, old people may cower 
deeper in their feather beds to shut out the 
baying of the phantom hounds that hunt the 
"barfoot stag" through Watendlath tarn and 
over the fells down into Borrowdale. There 
is said to be a local brownie, Hob-Thross by 
name, sometimes seen, a "body aw ower 
rough," lying by the fire at midnight. For 
all his shaggy look, he has so sensitive a spirit 

37 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

that, indefatigable though he is in stealthy 
household services, the least suggestion of 
recompense sends him weeping away. He 
will not even accept his daily dole of milk 
save on the condition that it be set out for 
him in a chipped bowl. 

But, in the main, the Lake Country keeps 
its secrets. The names are the telltales, and 
these speak of Briton and Saxon and the ad- 
venturous Viking. Dale, jell, jorce (water- 
fall), ghyll (mountain ravine), holm (island), 
how (mound), scar (cliff -face), are Icelandic 
words. Mountain names that seem undigni- 
fied, as Coniston Old Man or Dolly Wagon 
Pike, are probably mispronunciations of what 
in the original Celtic or Scandinavian was of 
grave import. There appears to be a present 
tendency to substitute for the unintelligible 
old names plain English terms usually sug- 
gested by some peculiarity in the moun- 
tain shape, but it is a pity to give up the 
Celtic Blencathara, Peak of Demons, for 
Saddleback. ». "■ 

The jubilant throngs who flock to Lake- 
land every summer concern themselves little 
with its early history. The English pour into 
that blessed circuit of hills as into a great play- 

38 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

ground, coaching, walking, cycling, climbing, 
boating, keenly alive to the beauty of the 
scenery and eagerly drinking in the exhil- 
aration of the air. They love to tread the 
loftiest crests, many of which are crowned 
with cairns raised by these holiday climb- 
ers, each adding his own stone. But it is 
the shepherd who is in the confidence of 
the mountains, he who has 

"been alone 
Amid the heart of many thousand mists, 
That came to him, and left him, on the heights." 

Wordsworth first learned to love humanity 
in the person of the shepherd 

"descried in distant sky, 
A solitary object and subHme." 

Sheep, too, are often seen against the sky-line, 
and even the cow — that homelike beast who 
favours you in her innocent rudeness, from the 
gap of a hawthorn hedge, with that same pro- 
longed, rustic, curious stare that has taxed 
your modesty in Vermont or Ohio — will for- 
sake the shade of "the honied sycamore" in 
the valley for summits 

"sharp and bare, 
Where oft the venturous heifer drinks the noontide breeze." 

39 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

There have been fatal accidents upon the 
more precipitous peaks. Scott and Words- 
worth have sung the fate of that "young lover 
of Nature," Charles Gough, who, one hun- 
dred years ago, fell from the Striding Edge 
of Helvellyn and was watched over in death 
for no less than three months by his little 
yellow- haired terrier, there on the lonely 
banks of Red Tarn, where her persistent 
barking at last brought shepherds to the body. 
In the Patterdale churchyard, whose famous 
great yew is now no more, we noticed a stone 
commemorating a more recent victim of Hel- 
vellyn, a Manchester botanist, who had come 
summer by summer to climb the mountain, 
and who, a few years since, on his last essay, 
a man of seventy- three, had died from ex- 
haustion during the ascent. The brow of 
Helvellyn, now soft and silvery as a melting 
dream, now a dark mass banded by broad 
rainbows, overlooks his grave. 

I remember that Nathan's story of the rich 
man who "had no pity," but took for a guest's 
dinner the "one little ewe lamb" of his poor 
neighbour, was read in the Patterdale church 
that evensong, and it was strange to see how 
intently those sturdy mountain-lads, their 

40 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

alert- eyed sheep dogs waiting about the door, 
listened to the parable. Not only does the 
Scripture imagery — " The Lord is my shep- 
herd; I shall not want" — but the phrasing 
of the prayerbook — "We have erred and 
strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep" — 
come with enhanced significance in a pastoral 
region. 

Lakeland in the tourist season is not at its 
best in point of flowers. The daffodils that 
in Gowbarrow Park — recently acquired and 
opened as a national preserve — rejoiced the 
poet as they danced beside the dancing waves 
of Ullswater, fade before July, and the patches 
of ling and heather upon the mountain-sides 
lack the abundance that purples the Scottish 
hills, but the delicate harebell nods blithely 
to the wayfarer from up among the rocks, and 
the foxglove grows so tall, especially in the 
higher passes, as to overtop those massive 
boundaries into which the "wallers" pack 
away all the loose stone they can. 

Birds, too, are not, in midsummer, numer- 
ous or varied. Where are Wordsworth's 
cuckoo and skylark and green linnet? The 
eagles have been dislodged from their eyries 
on Eagle Crag. A heavily flapping raven, 

41 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

a congregation of rooks, a few swallows and 
redbreasts, with perhaps a shy wagtail, may 
be the only winged wanderers you will salute 
in an hour's stroll, unless this, as is most likely, 
has brought you where 

"plots of sparkling water tremble bright 
With thousand thousand twinkling points of light." 

There you will be all but sure to see your 
Atlantic friends, the seagulls, circling slowly 
within the mountain barriers like prisoners 
of the air and adding their floating shadows 
to the reflections in the lake below. For, as 
Wordsworth notes, — what did Wordsworth 
fail to note ? — the water of these mountain 
meres is crystal clear and renders back with 
singular exactitude the " many- coloured im- 
ages imprest' ' upon it. 

But the life of the Cumbrian hills is the life 
of grazing flocks, of leaping waterfalls and 
hidden streams with their "voice of unpre- 
tending harmony," — the life of sun and 
shadow. Sometimes the sky is of a faint, 
sweet blue with white clouds wandering in 
it, — the old Greek myth of Apollo's flocks 
in violet meadows; sometimes the keenest 
radiance silvers the upper crest of cumuli that 

42 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

copy in form the massy summits below ; some- 
times the mellow sunset gold is poured into 
the valleys as into thirsty cups ; but most often 
curling mists wreathe the mountain- tops and 
move in plumed procession along their naked 
sides. 

The scenic effects and the joy of climbing 
are not lost by American tourists, yet these, 
as a rule, come to the Lake Country in a 
temper quite unlike that of the English holi- 
day seekers. We come as pilgrims to a Holy 
Land of Song. We depend perhaps too little 
upon our own immediate sense of grandeur 
and beauty, and look perhaps too much to 
Wordsworth to interpret for us "Nature's 
old felicities." The Lake Country that has 
loomed so large in poetry may even disap- 
point us at the outset. The memory of the 
Rockies, of our chain of Great Lakes, of 
Niagara, may disconcert our first impres- 
sions of this clump of hills with only four, 
Scafell Pike, Scafell, Helvellyn, and Skiddaw, 
exceeding three thousand feet in height; 
of lakes that range from Windermere, ten 
miles long and a mile broad, to the reedy little 
pond of Rydal Water, more conventionally 
termed "a fairy mere"; of waterfalls that are 

43 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

often chiefly remarkable, even Southey's Lo- 
dore, for their lack of water. Scales Tarn, 
of which Scott wrote, 

"Never sunbeam could discern 
The surface of that sable tarn, 
In whose black mirror you may spy 
The stars, while noontide lights the sky," 

is seventeen feet deep. 

It is all in proportion, all picturesque, — 
almost in too regular proportion, almost too 
conspicuously picturesque, as if it had been 
expressly gotten up for the " tripper." There 
is nothing of primeval wildness about it. Na- 
ture is here .the lion tamed, an accredited 
human playmate. Indeed, one almost feels 
that here is Nature sitting for her portrait, 
a self-conscious Nature holding her court of 
tourists and poets. Yet this is but a fleeting 
and a shamefaced mood. It takes intimacy 
to discover the fact of reticence, and those are 
aliens indeed who think that a single coach- 
drive, even the boasted "circular tour," has 
acquainted them with the Lake Country, — 
yes, though they trudge over the passes (for 
it is coach etiquette to put the passengers 
down whenever the road gets steep) Words- 
worth in hand. In truth, the great amount 

44 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

of literary association may be to the con- 
scientious "Laker" something of a burden. 
Skiddaw thrusts forth his notched contour 
with the insistent question: "What was it 
Wordsworth said about me?" Ennerdale 
church and the Pillar Rock tax one's memory 
of "The Brothers," and every stone sheep- 
fold calls for a recitation from "Michael." 
That "cradled nursling of the mountain," 
the river Duddon, expects one to know by 
heart the thirty-four sonnets recording how 
the pedestrian poet 

"accompanied with faithful pace 
Caerulean Duddon from its cloud-fed spring." 

The footpath you follow, the rock you rest 
upon, the yew you turn to admire, Wishing- 
Gate and Stepping- Stones admonish you to 
be ready with your quotation. Even the tiny 
cascade of Rydal Water — so small as pre- 
sumably to be put to bed at six o'clock, for it 
may not be visited after that hour — has been 
sung by the Grasmere laureate. While your 
care-free Englishman goes clambering over 
the golden- mossed rocks and far within the 
slippery recesses of Dungeon Ghyll, your 
serious American will sit him down amid the 

45 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

bracken and, tranquilly watched by Ling- 
moor from across the vale, read "The Idle 
Shepherd- Boys," and the exquisite descrip- 
tion of the scene in Mrs. Humphry Ward's 
"Fenwick's Career." If he can recall Cole- 
ridge's lines about the " sinful sextons' ghosts," 
so much the better, and if he is of a "thor- 
ough " habit of mind, he will have read 
through Wordsworth's "Excursion" in prep- 
aration for this expedition to the Lang- 
dales and be annotating the volume on his 
knee. , 

There may be something a little naive in 
this studious attitude in the presence of natural 
beauty, but the devotion is sincere. Many 
a tourist, English and American, comes to 
the Lake Country to render grateful homage 
to those starry spirits who have clustered 
there. Fox Howe, the home of Dr. Arnold 
and dear to his poet son; The Knoll, home 
of Harriet Martineau; and the Dove's Nest, 
for a little while the abode of Mrs. Hemans, 
are duly pointed out at Ambleside, but not 
all who linger in that picture-book village and 
climb the hill to the Church of St. Anne, stand- 
ing serene with its square, grey, pigeon- 
peopled tower, know that Faber was a curate 

46 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

there in the youthful years before he "went 
over to Rome." He lived hard by in what 
is said to be the oldest house in Ambleside, 
once a manor-house of distinction, — that 
long, low stone building with small, deep-set 
windows and the cheery touches of colour 
given by the carefully tended flowers about the 
doors. "A good few" people thought he was 
not "just bright," our landlady told us, "be- 
cause he would be walking with his head 
down, busy at his thoughts," yet Wordsworth 
said that Faber was the only man he knew 
who saw more things in Nature than he did 
in a country ramble. Bowness cherishes 
recollections of the gay, audacious doings of 
Professor Wilson (Christopher North), and 
Troutbeck plumes itself on being the birth- 
place of Hogarth's father. Keswick, where 
Shelley once made brief sojourn, holds the 
poet-dust of Southey and of Frederic Myers, 
and in Crosthwaite Vicarage may be found 
a living poet of the Lakes, Canon Rawnsley, 
— a name to conjure with throughout the 
district, whose best traditions he fosters and 
maintains. 

Opposite Rydal Mount, at Nab Cottage, 
dwelt, for the closing years of his clouded life, 

47 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

the darling of the dalesfolk, " Li'le Hartley," 
first-born son of Coleridge, — that boy " so 
exquisitely wild" to whom had descended 
something of his father's genius crossed by 
the father's frailty. Hartley's demon was 
not the craving for opium, but for alcohol. 
After a sore struggle that crippled but did 
not destroy, he rests in Grasmere churchyard, 
his stone bearing the inscription, "By Thy 
Cross and Passion." It was from Nab Cot- 
tage that another soul of high endowment, 
menaced by the opium lust, De Quincey, took 
a bride, Margaret, a farmer's daughter, who 
made him the strong and patient wife his peril 
needed. They dwelt in Dove Cottage at 
Townend, Grasmere, the hallowed garden- 
nest where Wordsworth and his wife and his 
sister Dorothy — that ardent spirit the 
thought of whom is still "like a flash of light " 
— had dwelt before. Wordsworth's later 
homes at Allan Bank, the Grasmere Rectory, 
and even at Rydal Mount are less precious 
to memory than this, where he and Coleridge 
and Dorothy dreamed the great dreams of 
youth together. Thither came guests who 
held high converse over frugal fare, — among 
them Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, "the 

48 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

frolic and the gentle," and that silent poet, 
the beloved brother John. It was a plain and 
thrifty life that Dove Cottage knew, with its 
rustic little rooms and round of household 
tasks, but thrift took on magic powers in the 
Lake Country a century ago. Amazing tales 
are told of the "Wonderful Walker," school- 
master of Buttermere and curate of Seath- 
waite, the Pastor of the "Excursion," but 
his feats of economy might be challenged by 
the old-time curate of Patterdale, who, on 
an income of from sixty to ninety dollars a 
year, lived comfortably, educated his four 
children, and left them a tidy little for- 
tune. Such queer turns of fate were his that 
he published his own banns and married his 
father. 

Most of those for whose sake the Lake 
Country is holy ground lived a contemplative, 
sequestered life akin to that of the mediaeval 
monks, the scholars and visionaries of a fight- 
ing world; but Coniston, on the edge of 
Lancashire, is the shrine of a warrior saint, 
Ruskin, whose last earthly home, Brantwood, 
looks out over Coniston Water, and whose 
grave in the quiet churchyard, for which 
Westminster Abbey was refused, is beauti- 
4 49 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

fully marked by a symbolically carven cross 
quarried from the fine greenstone of Coniston 
Fells. In the Ruskin Museum may be seen 
many heart- moving memorials of that hero 
life, all the way from the abstracts of sermons 
written out for his mother in a laborious 
childish hand to the purple pall, worked for 
him by the local Linen Industry he so eagerly 
founded, and embroidered with his own 
words: "Unto This Last." 

Not in any roll-call of the men of letters 
who have trodden the Cumbrian Hills should 
the poet Gray be forgotten. The first known 
tourist in the Lake Country, he was delighted 
with Grasmere and Keswick, but Borrow- 
dale, plunged deep amid what the earliest 
guide-book, that of West in 1774, was to de- 
scribe as "the most horrid romantic moun- 
tains," turned him back in terror. 

Yet Wordsworth, for all his illustrious com- 
peers, is still the presiding genius of these 
opalescent hills and silver meres. It is to 
him, that plain-faced man who used to go 
"booing" his verses along these very roads, 
that multitudes of visitants have owed 

"Feelings and emanations — things which were 
Light to the sun and music to the wind." 
50 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

It is good for the soul to follow that sane, pure 
life from its "fair seedtime" on the garden 
terrace at Cockermouth, where the murmur- 
ing Derwent gave 

"Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind, 
A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm 
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves," 

through the boyhood at Hawkshead — that 
all- angled little huddle of houses near Esth- 
waite Water — a boyhood whose inner growth 
is so marvellously portrayed in "The Prel- 
ude," on through the long and fruitful man- 
hood of a poet vowed, 

"Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought 
Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high, 
Matins and vespers of harmonious verse," 

to the churchyard beside the Rotha, where 
Wordsworth and his kin of flesh and spirit 
keep their "incommunicable sleep." 

"Blessing be with them, and eternal praise!" 



51 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

Where is the stranger? Rushes, ladies, rushes, 
Rushes as green as summer for this stranger. 

Fletcher's " Valentinian." 



WE heard about it first in Ambleside. 
We were in lodgings half-way up the 
hill that leads to the serene, for- 
saken Church of St. Anne. It was there that 
Faber, fresh from Oxford, had been curate, 
silently thinking the thoughts that were to 
send him into the Roman communion, and 
his young ghost, with the bowed head and 
the troubled eyes, was one of the friends we 
had made in the few rainy days of our so- 
journ. Another was Jock, a magnificent old 
collie, who accepted homage as his royal due, 
and would press his great head against the 
knee of the alien with confident expectation 
of a caress, lifting in recognition a long, com- 
prehending look of amber eyes. Another 
friend — though our relations were some- 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

times strained — was Toby, a piebald pony 
of piquant disposition. He allowed us to sit 
in his pony- cart at picturesque spots and read 
the Lake Poets to him, and to tug him up the 
hills by his bridle, which he had expert ways 
of rubbing off, to the joy of passing coach- 
loads, when our attention was diverted to the 
landscape. Another was our kindly land- 
lady. She came in with hot tea that Satur- 
day afternoon to cheer up the adventurous 
member of the party, who had just returned 
half drowned from a long drive on coachtop 
for the sake of scenery absolutely blotted out 
by the downpour. There the " trippers" had 
sat for hours, huddled under trickling um- 
brellas, while the conscientious coachman 
put them off every now and then to clamber 
down wet banks and gaze at waterfalls, or 
halted for the due five minutes at a point 
where nothing was perceptible but the grey 
slant of the rain to assure them — and the 
spattered red guidebook confirmed his state- 
ment — that this was " the finest view in 
Westmoreland." So when our landlady be- 
gan to tell us of the ancient ceremony which 
the village was to observe that afternoon, 
the bedrenched one, hugging the bright dot 

53 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

of a fire, grimly implied that the customs 
and traditions of this sieve- skied island — 
in five weeks we had had only two rainless 
days — were nothing to her ; but the tea, 
that moral beverage which enables the Eng- 
lish to bear with their climate, wrought its 
usual reformation. 

At half-past five we were standing under 
our overworked umbrellas on a muddy street 
corner, waiting for the procession to come 
by. And presently it came, looking very 
much as if it had been through a pond to 
gather the rushes. In front went a brass 
band, splashing along the puddles to merry 
music, and then a long train of draggled chil- 
dren, with a few young men and maidens to 
help on the toddlers, two or three of whom 
had to be taken up and carried, flowers and 
all. But soberly and sturdily, in the main, 
that line of three hundred bonny bairns 
trotted along through the heavy clay, under 
the soft rain — little lads in rubber coats and 
gaiters, some holding their tall bunches of 
rushes, or elaborate floral designs, upright 
before them like bayonets, some shouldering 
them like guns; tired little lassies clasping 
their "bearings" in their arms like dolls, or 

54 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

dragging them along like kittens. All down 
the line the small coats and cloaks were not 
only damp, but greened and mossed and 
petal-strewn from the resting and rubbing 
of one another's burdens. These were of 
divers sorts. Most effective were the slender 
bundles of rushes, — long, straight rushes 
gathered that morning from the meres by 
men who went out in boats for the purpose. 
These rush-fagots towered up from a dis- 
tance like green candles, making the line re- 
semble a procession of Catholic fairies. The 
village, however, took chief pride in the moss- 
covered standards of various device entwined 
with rushes and flowers. There were harps of 
reeds and waterlilies, crosses of ferns and hare- 
bells, shepherds', crooks wound with heather, 
sceptres, shields, anchors, crowns, swords, 
stars, triangles, hearts, with all manner of 
nosegays and garlands. Ling and bracken 
from the hillsides, marigolds from the marsh, 
spikes of oat and spears of wheat from the 
harvest-fields, and countless bright- hued blos- 
soms from meadow and dooryard and garden 
were woven together, with no little taste and 
skill, in a pretty diversity of patterns. 
The bells rang out blithe welcome as the 
55 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

procession neared the steepled Church of St. 
Mary, where a committee of ladies and gen- 
tlemen received the offerings and disposed 
them, according to their merit, in chancel or 
aisles. The little bearers were all seated in 
the front pews, the pews of honour, before 
we thronging adults, stacking our dripping 
umbrellas in the porch, might enter. The 
air was rich with mingled fragrances. Along 
the chancel rail, in the window- seats, on the 
pillars, everywhere, were rushes and flowers, 
the choicest garden-roses whispering with 
foxglove and daisy and the feathered timothy 
grass. But sweeter than the blossoms were 
the faces of the children, glad in their rustic 
act of worship, well content with their own 
weariness, no prouder than the smiling angels 
would have had them be. Only here and 
there a rosy visage was clouded with disap- 
pointment, or twisted ruefully awry in the 
effort to hold back the tears, for it must needs 
be that a few devices, on which the childish 
artists had spent such joyful labour, were as- 
signed by the expert committee to incon- 
spicuous corners^ The mere weans behaved 
surprisingly well, though evensong, a brief 
and sympathetic service, was punctuated by 

56 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

little sobs, gleeful baby murmurs, and crows 
of excitement. The vicar told the children, 
in a few simple words, how, in earlier times, 
when the church was unpaved, the earth- 
floor was strewn with sweet- smelling rushes, 
renewed every summer, and that the rushes 
and flowers of to-day were brought in memory 
of the past, and in gratitude for the beauty of 
their home among the hills and lakes. Then 
the fresh child voices rang out singing praises 
to Him who made it all : 

"The purple-headed mountain, 
The river running by, 
The sunset, and the morning 
That brightens up the sky." 

They sang, too, their special hymn written 
for the Ambleside rush- bearers seventy years 
ago, by the well- beloved vicar of Brathay, the 
Rev. Owen Lloyd: 

"Our fathers to the house of God, 
As yet a building rude, 
Bore offerings from the flowery sod, 
And fragrant rushes strew'd. 



'These, of the great Redeemer's grace 
Bright emblems, here are seen; 

He makes to smile the desert place 

With flowers and rushes green." 

57 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

One highly important ceremony, to the 
minds of the children, was yet to come, — the 
presentation of the gingerbread. As they 
filed out of the church, twopenny slabs of a 
peculiarly black and solid substance were 
given into their eager little hands. The rain 
had ceased, and we grown-ups all waited in 
the churchyard, looking down on the issuing 
file of red tam-o'-shanters, ribboned straw 
hats, worn grey caps, and, wavering along very 
low in the line, soft, fair- tinted baby hoods, 
often cuddled up against some guardian knee. 
Under the varied headgear ecstatic feasting 
had begun even in the church porch, though 
some of the children were too entranced with 
excitement to find their mouths. One chubby 
urchin waved his piece of gingerbread in the 
air, and another laid his on a gravestone and 
inadvertently sat down on it. A bewildered 
wee damsel in robin's- egg blue had lost hers 
in the basket of wild flowers that was slung 
about her neck. One spud of a boy, roaring 
as he came, was wiping his eyes with his. 
In general, however, the rush- bearers were 
munching with such relish that they did not 
trouble themselves to remove the tissue pa- 
per adhering to the bottom of each cake, 

58 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

but swallowed that as contentedly as the rest. 
Meanwhile their respective adults were swoop- 
ing down upon them, dabbing the smear of 
gingerbread off cheeks and chins, buttoning up 
little sacques and jackets, and whisking off the 
most obtrusive patches of half- dried mud. 
Among these parental regulators was a beam- 
ing old woman with a big market-basket on her 
arm, who brushed and tidied as impartially as 
if she were grandmother to the whole parish. 

Then, again, rang out those gleeful har- 
monies of which our Puritan bells know noth- 
ing. The circle of mountains, faintly flushed 
with an atoning sunset, looked benignly down 
on a spectacle familiar to them for hundreds 
of Christian summer- tides; and if they re- 
membered it still longer ago, as a pagan rite 
in honour of nature gods, they discreetly 
kept their knowledge to themselves. 

The rushes and flowers brightened the 
church through the Sunday services, which 
were well attended by both dalesfolk and 
visitors. On Monday twelve prizes were 
awarded, and the bearings were taken away 
by their respective owners. Then followed 
" the treat," an afternoon of frolic, with rain 
only now and then, on a meadow behind St. 

59 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

Mary's. The ice-cream cart, the climbing- 
pole, swings and games, seemed to hold the 
full attention of the children, to each of whom 
was tied a cup; but when the simple supper 
was brought on to higher ground close by the 
church, who sat like a gentle mother in the 
very midst of the merry- make, a jubilant, 
universal shout, "It's coom! It's coom!" 
sent all the small feet scampering toward the 
goodies. To crown it all, the weather oblig- 
ingly gave opportunity, on the edge of the 
evening, for fireworks, which even the poor lit- 
tle Wesleyans outside the railing could enjoy. 

II 

The Ambleside rush-bearing takes place 
on the Saturday before the last Sunday in 
July. The more famous Grasmere rush- 
bearing comes on the Saturday next after St. 
Oswald's Day, August fifth. This year (1906) 
these two festivals fell just one week apart. 
The London papers were announcing that 
it was "brilliant weather in the Lakes," 
which, in a sense, it was, for the gleams of 
sunshine between the showers were like open- 
ing doors of Paradise ; yet we arrived at Gras- 

60 




THE HUSH-BEARING AT GRASMERE 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

mere so wet that we paid our sixpences to 
enter Dove Cottage, a shrine to which we had 
already made due pilgrimage, and had a cosey 
half-hour with Mrs. Dixon, well known to 
the tourist world, before the fireplace whose 
quiet glow often gladdened the poets and 
dreamers of its great days gone by. 

Our canny old hostess, in the bonnet and 
shawl which seem to be her official wear, was 
not disposed this afternoon to talk of the 
Words worths, whom she had served in her 
girlhood. Her mind was on the rush- bearing 
for which she had baked the gingerbread 
forty- three years. There were five hundred 
squares this time, since, in addition to what 
would be given to the children, provision 
must be made for the Sunday afternoon teas 
throughout Grasmere. The rolling out of the 
dough had not grown easier with the passing of 
nearly half a century, and she showed us the 
swollen muscles of her wrist. Her little grand- 
daughters, their flower erections borne proudly 
in their arms, were dressed all spick and span 
for the procession, and stood with her, for their 
pictures, at the entrance to Dove Cottage. 

It was still early, and we strolled over to 
the tranquil church beside the Rotha. Under 

61 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

the benediction of that grey, embattled tower, 
in the green churchyard with 

"Ridge rising gently by the side of ridge, 
A heaving surface," 

sleep Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and 
their kindred, while the names of Hartley 
Coleridge and Arthur Hugh Clough may be 
read on stones close by. We brought the 
poets white heather and heart's ease for our 
humble share in the rush- bearing. 

Grasmere church, with its strange row of 
rounded arches down the middle of the nave 
and its curiously raftered roof, still wears the 
features portrayed in The Excursion: 

"Not raised in nice proportions was the pile, 
But large and massy; for duration built; 
With pillars crowded, and the roof upheld 
By naked rafters intricately crossed, 
Like leafless underbought, in some thick wood, 
All withered by the depths of shade above. 
Admonitory texts inscribed the walls, 
Each in its ornamental scroll enclosed, 
Each also crowned with winged heads — a pair 
Of rudely painted Cherubim. The floor 
Of nave and aisle, in unpretending guise, 
Was occupied by oaken benches ranged 
In seemly rows; the chancel only showed 
Some vain distinctions, marks of earthly state, 
By immemorial privilege allowed." 
62 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

There were a number of people in the 
church, but the reverent hush was almost 
unbroken. Strangers in the green church- 
yard were moving softly about, reading 
the inscriptions on stones and brasses, or 
waiting in the pews, some in the attitude of 
devotion. In the south aisle leaned against 
the wall the banner of St. Oswald, a crim- 
son-bordered standard, with the figure of 
the saint in white and crimson, worked 
on a golden ground. A short, stout per- 
sonage, with grey chin- whiskers and a pom- 
pous air, presumably the sexton, came in a 
little after three with a great armful of fresh 
rushes, and commenced to strew the floor. 
Soon afterwards the children, with their 
bearings, had taken their positions, ranged in 
a long row on the broad churchyard wall, 
fronting the street, which by this time was 
crowded with spectators, for the Grasmere 
rush- bearing is the most noted among the 
few survivals of what was once, in the north- 
ern counties of England, a very general 
observance. There is an excellent ac- 
count of it, by an eyewitness, as early as 
1789. James Clarke, in his Survey of the 
Lakes, wrote : 

63 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

"I happened once to be at Grasmere, at what they 
call a Rushbearing. . . . About the latter end of 
September a number of young women and girls 
(generally the whole parish) go together to the tops 
of the hills to gather rushes. These they carry to the 
church, headed by one of the smartest girls in the com- 
pany. She who leads the procession is styled the 
Queen, and carries in her hand a huge garland, and 
the rest usually have nosegays. The Queen then goes 
and places her garland upon the pulpit, where it re- 
mains till after the next Sunday. The rest then strew 
their rushes upon the bottom of the pews, and at the 
church door they are met by a fiddler, who plays be- 
fore them to the public house, where the evening is 
spent in all kinds of rustic merriment." 

Still more interesting is the record, in 
Hone's Year Book, by "A Pedestrian." On 
July 21, 1827, the walking tour of this witness 
brought him to Grasmere. 

"The church door was open, and I discovered that 
the villagers were strewing the floors with fresh rushes. 
. . . During the whole of this day I observed the chil- 
dren busily employed in preparing garlands of such 
wild flowers as the beautiful valley produces, for the 
evening procession, which commenced at nine, in the 
following order: The children, chiefly girls, holding 
their garlands, paraded through the village, preceded 
by the Union band. They then entered the church, 
when the three largest garlands were placed on the 
altar, and the remaining ones in various parts of the 

64 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

place. In the procession I observed the 'Opium 
Eater,' Mr. Barber, an opulent gentleman residing in 
the neighbourhood, Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth, Miss 
Wordsworth and Miss Dora Wordsworth. Words- 
worth is the chief supporter of these rustic ceremonies. 
The procession over, the party adjourned to the ball- 
room, a hayloft at my worthy friend Mr. Bell's (now 
the Red Lion), where the country lads and lasses 
tripped it merrily and heavily. They called the 
amusement dancing. I called it thumping; for he 
who made the most noise seemed to be esteemed the 
best dancer; and on the present occasion I think Mr. 
Pooley, the schoolmaster, bore away the palm. Billy 
Dawson, the fiddler, boasted to me of having been 
the officiating minstrel at this ceremony for the last 
six and forty years. . . . The dance was kept up to 
a quarter of twelve, when a livery servant entered 
and delivered the following verbal message to Billy: 
'Master's respects, and will thank you to lend him 
the fiddle-stick.' Billy took the hint, the Sabbath was 
at hand, and the pastor of the parish (Sir Richard le 
Fleming) had adopted this gentle mode of apprising 
the assembled revellers that they ought to cease their 
revelry. The servant departed with the fiddle-stick, 
the chandelier was removed, and when the village clock 
struck twelve not an individual was to be seen out of 
doors in the village." 

Since then many notices of the Grasmere 
rush-bearings have been printed, the most 
illuminating being that of the Rev. Canon 
5 65 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

Rawnsley, 1890, now included in one of his 
several collections of Lake Country sketches. 
He calls attention to the presence, among the 
bearings, of designs that suggest a Miracle 
Play connection, as Moses in the bulrushes, 
the serpent on a pole, and the harps of David 
and Miriam, — emblems which were all in 
glowing evidence this past summer. A merry 
and sympathetic account is given in a ballad 
of 1864, ascribed to Mr. Edward Button, 
formerly the Grasmere schoolmaster: 

"In Grasmere's hill-girt valley, 
'T is pleasant to recall 
The children of the dalesmen hold 
A pretty festival. 



'!The children of the valley 
To this day faithful keep 
The custom of their hardy sires 
Who in the churchyard sleep. 

"For when hot summer's waning, 
They to the lake repair 
To pull the reeds and lilies white 
That grow in plenty there. 

"With these, and ferns and mosses, 
And flowers of varied dye, 
They hasten home, and all day long 
Their busy fingers ply. 
66 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

"Then in the quiet evening, 
Ere dew begins to fall, 
They range their floral trophies on 
The churchyard's low-topped wall. 

"There crosses without number, 
Of every shape and size, 
And wreaths, triangles, crowns, and shields 
Appear in flowery guise. 

"And verses, too, and mottoes, 
Words ta'en from Holy Writ, 
And some designs which mock the pen, 
We '11 call them nondescript. 

"But all are glad and happy 
Who in the pageant share, 
And the urchins with the nondescripts 
Are proud as any there. 

"And proudly struts each youngster, 
When, devices gay in hand, 
They round about the village march 
To the music of the band. 

"Like to a string of rainbows 
Appears that cortege bright, 
Winding 'mong the crooked lanes 
In the golden evening light! 

"And coming to the church again 
They bear their garlands in, 
They fix them round the time-stained fane 
While the bells make merry din. 
G7 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

t'. But hark! before departing 
From that house of prayer, 
The incense of a grateful hymn 
Floats on the quiet air." 

The older hymn of St. Oswald — 

"They won us peace, Thy saints, O Lord, 
Even though, like royal David, they 
Smiting and smitten with the sword 
Toiled through their mortal day " — 

is now followed by a hymn from the pen of 
Canon Rawnsley, whose genial notice, as he 
passed this August along the churchyard wall 
of bearings, brought a happy flush to one 
child-face after another: 

"The Rotha streams, the roses blow, 
Though generations pass away, 
And still our old traditions flow 
From pagan past and Roman day. 

"Beside the church our poets sleep, 

Their spirits mingle with our throng; 
They smile to see the children keep 

Our ancient feast with prayer and song. 



"We too have foes in war to face, 
Not yet our land from sin is free. 
Lord, give us of St. Oswald's grace 
To make us kings and saints to Thee." 
68 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

The Grasmere rush- bearing, so far as we 
saw it, was lacking in none of the tradi- 
tional features, not even the rain. Yet the 
gently falling showers seemed all unheeded 
by the line of bright-eyed children, stead- 
fastly propping up on the wall their various 
tributes. Banners and crosses and crowns 
were there, and all the customary emblems. 
Among the several harps was one daintily 
wrought of marguerites; two little images of 
Moses reposed in arks woven of flags and 
grasses; on a moss-covered lattice was traced 
in lilies: "Consider the lilies of the field." 
The serpent was made of tough green stems, 
knotted and twisted together in a long coil 
about a pole. Geranium, maiden-hair fern, 
Sweet William, pansies, daisies, dahlias, asters, 
fuchsias mingled their hues in delicate and 
intricate devices. Among the decorated per- 
ambulators was one all wreathed in heather, 
with a screen of rushes rising high behind. 
Its flower-faced baby was all but hidden under 
a strewing of roses more beautiful than any 
silken robe, and a wand twined with lilies of 
the valley swayed unsteadily from his pink 
fist. Six little maidens in white and green, 
holding tall stalks of rushes, upheld the rush- 

69 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

bearing sheet — linen spun at Grasmere and 
woven at Keswick — crossed by blossoming 
sprays. 

The rush- cart, bearing the ribbon- tied 
bunches of rushes, crowned with leafy oak- 
boughs and hung with garlands, belonged 
especially to Lancashire, where it has not 
yet entirely disappeared; indeed a rush-cart 
has been seen in recent years taking its way 
through one of the most squalid quarters of 
grimy Manchester; but the rush-sheet, on 
which the precious articles of the parish, 
silver tankards, teapots, cups, spoons, snuff- 
boxes, all lent to grace this festival, were 
arranged, had really gone out until, in this sim- 
plified form, it was revived a few years ago at 
Grasmere by lovers of the past. That the 
sheet now holds only flowers is due to that 
same inexorable logic of events which has 
brought it about that no longer the whole 
parish with cart-loads of rushes, no longer, 
even, the strong lads and lasses swinging aloft 
bunches of rushes and glistening holly boughs, 
but only little children ranged in cherubic 
row along the churchyard wall, and crowing 
babies in their go-carts, bring to St. Oswald 
the tribute of the summer. 

70 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

It was from coach- top we caught our fare- 
well glimpse of the charming scene. The 
village band, playing the Grasmere rush- 
bearing march — an original tune believed to 
at least one hundred and fifty years old — 
led the way, followed by the gold and crimson 
banner oj; the warrior saint. The rush-sheet, 
borne by the little queen and her maids of 
honour, came after, and then the throng of 
one hundred or more children, transforming 
the street into a garden with the beauty and 
sweetness of their bearings. As the proces- 
sion neared the church, the bells pealed out 
" with all their voices," and we drove off under 
a sudden pelt of rain, remembering Words- 
worth's reference to 

"This day, when forth by rustic music led, 
The village children, while the sky is red 
With evening lights, advance in long array 
Through the still churchyard, each with garland gay, 
That, carried sceptre-like, o'ertops the head 
Of the proud bearer." 

Our third rush-bearing we found in Che- 
shire, on Sunday, August 12. A morning 
train from Manchester brought us to Mac- 
clesfield — keeping the Sabbath with its silk- 
mills closed, and its steep streets nearly empty 

71 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

— in time for luncheon and a leisurely drive, 
through occasional gusts of rain, four miles 
to the east, up and up, into the old Maccles- 
field Forest. This once wild woodland, in- 
fested by savage boars, a lurking-place for 
outlaws, is now open pasture, grazed over by 
cows whose milk has helped to make the fame 
of Cheshire cheese. But Forest Chapel still 
maintains a rite which flourished when the 
long since perished trees were sprouts and 
saplings. 

It is a tiny brown church, nested in a hollow 
of the hills, twelve hundred feet above the 
sea. In the moss- crowned porch, whose 
arch was wreathed with flowers and grasses, 
stood the vicar, as we came up, welcoming 
the guests of the rush- bearing. For people 
were panting up the hill in a continuous 
stream, mill hands from Macclesfield and 
farmer-folk from all the hamlets round. Per- 
haps seven or eight hundred were gathered 
there, hardly one- fourth of whom could find 
room within the church. 

We passed up the walk, thickly strewn with 
rushes, under that brightly garlanded porch, 
into a little sanctuary that was a very arbour 
of greenery and blossom. As we were led up 

72 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

the aisle, our feet sank in a velvety depth of 
rushes. The air was delicious with fresh, 
woodsy scents. A cross of lilies rose from 
the rush- tapestried font. The window-seats 
were filled with bracken, fern, and goldenrod. 
The pulpit and reading-desk were curtained 
with long sprays of bloom held in green bands 
of woven rushes. The chancel walls were 
hidden by wind- swayed greens from which 
shone out, here and there, clustering hare- 
bells, cottage roses, and the golden glint of the 
sunflower. The hanging lamps were gay 
with asters, larkspur, and gorse. The whole 
effect was indescribably joyous and rural, 
frankly suggestive of festivity. 

It was early evensong, a three o'clock ser- 
vice. There was to be another at five. After 
the ritual came the full- voiced singing of a 
familiar hymn: 

"Before the hills in order stood, 
Or earth received her frame, 
From everlasting Thou art God, 
To endless years the same. 



"Time, like an ever-rolling stream, 
Bears all its sons away; 
They fly forgotten, as a dream 
Dies at the opening day." 
73 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

So singing, the little congregation filed out 
into the churchyard, where the greater con- 
gregation, unable to gain access, was singing 
too. It was one of the rare hours of sunshine, 
all the more blissful for their rarity. The 
preacher of the day took his stand on a flat 
tombstone. Little girls were lifted up to 
seats upon the churchyard wall, and coats 
were folded and laid across low monuments 
for the comfort of the old people. A few 
little boys, on their first emergence into the 
sunshine, could not resist the temptation to 
turn an unobtrusive somersault or so over the 
more distant mounds, but they were promptly 
beckoned back by their elders and squatted 
submissively on the turf. The most of the 
audience stood in decorous quiet. Two 
generations back, gingerbread stalls and all 
manner of booths would have been erected 
about the church, and the rustics, clumping 
up the steep path in the new boots which 
every farmer was expected to give his men 
for the rush-bearing, would have diversified 
the services by drinking and wrestling. 

But altogether still and sacred was the scene 
on which we looked back as the compulsion 
of the railway time-table drew us away; 

74 



THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 

the low church tower keeping watch and 
ward over that green enclosure of God's 
acre, with the grey memorial crosses and 
the throng of living worshippers, — a throng 
that seemed so shadowy, so evanescent, 
against the long memories of Forest Chapel 
and the longer memories of those sunlit 
hills that rejoiced on every side. A yellow 
rick rose just behind the wall, the straws 
blowing in the wind as if they wanted to 
pull away and go to church with the rushes. 
On the further side of the little temple there 
towered a giant chestnut, a dome of shining 
green that seemed to overspread and shelter 
its Christian neighbour, as if in recognition of 
some ancient kinship, some divine primeval 
bond, attested, perhaps, by this very rite of 
rush- bearing. The enfolding blue of the 
sky, tender with soft sunshine, hallowed them 
both. 



75 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL 

COUNTIES 

I. Lancashire 

WE all know Liverpool, — but how 
do we know it? The Landing 
Stage, hotels whose surprisingly 
stable floors, broad beds, and fresh foods are 
grateful to the sea- worn, the inevitable bank, 
perhaps the shops. Most of us arrive at Liv- 
erpool only to hurry out of it, — to Chester, 
to London, to the Lakes. Seldom do the 
beguilements of the Head Boots prevail upon 
the impatient American to visit the birth- 
places of its two queerly assorted lions, " Mr. 
Gladstone and Mrs. 'Emans," of whom the 
second would surely roar us "as gently as any 
sucking dove." Yet we might give a passing 
thought to these as well as to the high-hearted 
James Martineau and to Hawthorne, our su- 
preme artist in romance, four of whose pre- 
cious years the country wasted in that " dusky 
and stifled chamber" of Brunswick Street. 

76 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

And hours must be precious indeed to the vis- 
itor who cannot spare even one for the Walker 
Fine Art Gallery, where hangs Rossetti's great 
painting of " Dante's Dream," — the Floren- 
tine, his young face yearning with awe and 
grief, led by compassionate Love to the couch 
of Beatrice, who lies death- pale amid the flush 
of poppies. 

But the individuality of Liverpool is in its 
docks, — over six miles of serried basins hol- 
lowed out of the bank of the broad Mersey, 
one of the hardest- worked rivers in the world, 
— wet docks and dry docks, walled and gated 
and quayed. From the busiest point of all, 
the Landing Stage, the mighty ocean liners 
draw out with their throngs of wearied hol- 
iday-makers and their wistful hordes of 
emigrant home- seekers. And all along the 
wharves stand merchantmen of infinite variety, 
laden with iron and salt, with soap and sugar, 
with earthenware and clay, with timber and 
tobacco, with coal and grain, with silks and 
woollens, and, above all, with cotton, — the 
raw cotton sent in not only from our own 
southern plantations, but from India and 
Egypt as well, and the returning cargoes of 
cloth spun and woven in " the cotton towns " 

77 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

of Lancashire. The life of Liverpool is com- 
merce; it is a city of warehouses and shops. 
The wide sea- range and the ever- plying ferry- 
boats enable the merchant princes to reside 
well out of the town. So luxurious is the lot 
of these merchants deemed to be that Lan- 
cashire has set in opposition the terms "a 
Liverpool gentleman" and " a Manchester 
man," while one of the ruder cotton towns, 
Bolton, adds its contribution of " a Bolton 
chap." This congestion of life in the great 
port means an extreme of poverty as well as 
of riches. The poor quarters of Liverpool 
have been called " the worst slums in Chris- 
tendom," yet a recent investigation has shown 
that within a limited area, selected because 
of its squalor and misery, over five thousand 
pounds a year goes in drink. The families 
that herd together by threes and fours in a 
single dirty cellar, sleeping on straw and 
shavings, nevertheless have money to spend 
at "the pub," — precisely the same flaring, 
gilded ginshop to-day as when Hawthorne 
saw and pitied its " sad revellers " half a 
century ago. 

While Liverpool has a sorry pre-eminence 
for high death-rate and for records of vice and 

78 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

crime, Manchester, " the cinder-heap," may 
fairly claim to excel in sheer dismalness. The 
river Irwell, on which it stands, is so black 
that the Manchester clerks, as the saying 
goes, run down to it every morning and fill 
their ink-pots. Not only Manchester, but all 
the region for ten miles around, is one monster 
cotton factory. The towns within this sooty 
ring — tall- chimneyed Bolton; Bury, that has 
been making cloth since the days of Henry 
VIII ; Middleton on the sable Irk ; Rochdale, 
whose beautiful river is forced to toil not 
for cotton only, but for flannels and fustians 
and friezes; bustling Oldham; Ashton-under- 
Lyme, with its whirr of more than three 
million spindles ; Staley Bridge on the Tame ; 
Stockport in Cheshire; Salford, which practi- 
cally makes one town with Manchester; and 
Manchester itself — all stand on a deep coal- 
field. The miners may be seen, of a Sunday 
afternoon, lounging at the street corners, or 
engaged in their favourite sport of flying car- 
rier pigeons, as if the element of air had a pecu- 
liar attraction for these human gnomes. If 
the doves that they fly are white, it is by some 
special grace, for smut lies thick on wall and 
ledge, on the monotonous ranks of " working- 

79 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

men's homes," on the costly public buildings, 
on the elaborate groups of statuary. One's 
heart aches for the sculptor whose dream is 
hardly made pure in marble before it becomes 
dingy and debased. 

Beyond the borders of this magic coal-field, 
above which some dark enchantment binds all 
humanity in an intertwisted coil of spinning, 
weaving, bleaching, printing, buying, selling 
cotton, are various outlying collieries upon 
which other manufacturing towns are built, 
— Warrington, which at the time of our Rev- 
olution supplied the Royal Navy with half 
its sail-cloth; Wigan, whose tradition goes 
back to King Arthur, but whose renown is 
derived from its seam of cannel coal; calico 
Chorley ; Preston, of warlike history and still 
the centre of determined strikes; and plenty 
more. 

The citizens of the cotton towns are proud 
of their grimy bit of the globe, and with good 
reason. " Rightly understood," said Disraeli, 
" Manchester is as great a human exploit as 
Athens." The swift industrial growth, the 
vast business expansion of all this region, are 
to be counted among the modern miracles of 
progress, barren of beauty and joy as their 

80 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

present stage may seem to be. The heroes 
held in memory here are plain workingmen 
whose mechanical inventions resulted in the 
English spinning-mill, — John Kay of Bury, 
James Hargreaves of Blackburn, Samuel 
Crompton of Bolton, and Sir Richard Ark- 
wright, a native of Preston, who began his 
career as a barber's apprentice and won his 
accolade by an energy of genius which virtu- 
ally created the cotton manufacture in Lan- 
cashire. The battle legends are of angry 
mobs and smashed machinery, of garrisoned 
mills and secret experiments and inventors in 
peril of their lives. The St. George of Lan- 
cashire is George Stephenson, the sturdy 
Scotchman, who in 1830 constructed that 
pioneer railway between Liverpool and Man- 
chester, — a road which had to perform no 
mean exploit in crossing the quaking bog of 
Chat Moss. Fanny Kemble, when a girl of 
twenty- one, had the ecstasy of a trial trip with 
Stephenson himself. She tells with fairy-tale 
glamour how " his tame dragon flew panting 
along his iron pathway " at " its utmost speed, 
thirty-four miles an hour, swifter than a bird 
flies." Wonder of wonders, this " brave little 
she- dragon " could " run with equal facility 
6 81 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

backwards or forwards." This trip took 
place at the end of August, preliminary to the 
final opening on September fifteenth, an occa- 
sion whose triumph was marred by a fatal 
mischance, in that a stray dragon ran over 
a director who was innocently standing on the 
track. For a patron saint of to-day, Man- 
chester need go no further than to the founder 
of the Ancoats Brotherhood, Charles Row- 
ley, that cheery philanthropist reminding one 
of Hawthorne's friend who brightened the 
dreary visages he met "as if he had carried 
a sunbeam in his hand"; for the disciples 
of the Beautiful, the followers of the Golden 
Rule, are full of courage even here among 
what the poet Blake would designate as " dark 
Satanic mills." From out the dirt and din, 
shrieking engines, roaring furnaces, clattering 
machinery, chimneys belching smoke by day 
and flame by night, blithely rises the song of 
their Holy War: 

"I will not cease from mental fight, 

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, 
Till we have built Jerusalem 

In England's green and pleasant land." 

But this, though the modern reality of 
South Lancashire, is not what the tourist 

82 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

goes out to see. From Liverpool to Furness 
Abbey is his natural and joyful route. He 
steams at full speed up this richest, most 
prosperous, and well-nigh most unattractive 
part of England ; he has left the Mersey, the 
county's southern boundary, far behind; he 
crosses the Ribble, which flows through the 
centre of Lancashire, and the Lune, which 
enters it from Westmoreland on the north and 
soon empties into Morecambe Bay. He has 
come from a district close- set with factory 
towns, scarred with mine shafts and slag 
heaps, into the sweet quietude of an agricul- 
tural and pastoral region. But still above 
and beyond him is Furness, that northern- 
most section of Lancashire lying between 
Cumberland and Westmoreland and shut off 
from the rest of the county by Morecambe 
Bay and the treacherous Lancaster sands. 
High Furness is a part of the Lake Country, 
claiming for Lancashire not only Coniston 
Lake but even one side of Windermere, which 
lies on the Westmoreland border. Its Cum- 
berland boundary is the sonneted Duddon. 
Low Furness, the peninsula at the south of 
this isolated strip, has a wealth of mineral 
deposits, especially iron. The town Barrow- 

83 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

in-Furness, which in 1846 consisted of a single 
hut, with one fishing-boat in the harbour, has 
been converted, by the development of the 
mines, into a place of much commercial con- 
sequence. Yet the lover of poetry will visit 
it, not for its steel works, figuring so tragically 
in Mrs. Humphry Ward's " Helbeck of Ban- 
nisdale," nor for its shipbuilding yards and 
boasted floating docks, nor for the paper 
works which take in a tree at one end and 
put it out as boxes of dainty stationery at 
the other, but in order to reach, by a boat 
from Peele Pier, Wordsworth's Peele Castle, 
"standing here sublime," — that old island 
fortress which the poet's dream has glori- 
fied with 

"The light that never was on sea or land." 

But it is to Furness Abbey that the 
throngs of sightseers come, and well they 
may. Its melancholy grace is one of the 
treasures of memory. It was thither that 
Wordsworth as a schoolboy — for Hawks- 
head is within the limits of Furness — would 
sometimes ride with his fellows. The 
" Prelude " holds the picture, as he saw it 
over a century ago, of 

84 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

"the antique walls 
Of that large abbey, where within the Vale 
Of Nightshade, to St. Mary's honour built, 
Stands yet a mouldering pile with fractured arch, 
Belfry, and images, and living trees; 
A holy scene! Along the smooth green turf 
Our horses grazed. To more than inland peace 
Left by the west wind sweeping overhead 
From a tumultuous ocean, trees and towers 
In that sequestered valley may be seen, 
Both silent and both motionless alike; 
Such the deep shelter that is there, and such 
The safeguard for repose and quietness." 

We lingered there for days, held by the 
brooding spell of that most lovely ruin. Hour 
upon hour we would wander about among 
the noble fragments which Nature was so 
tenderly comforting for the outrages of His 
Rapacity Henry VIII. Harebells shone blue 
from the top of the broken arch of the tall east 
window, whose glass was long since shattered 
and whose mullions were wrenched away. 
Grasses and all manner of little green weeds 
had climbed up to triforium and clerestory, 
where they ran lightly along the crumbling 
edges. Ivy tapestries were clinging to the 
ragged stone surfaces. Thickets of night- 
shade mantled the sunken tombs and altar 
steps. Ferns nodded over the fretted cano- 

85 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

pies of the richly wrought choir stalls and 
muffled the mouths of fierce old gargoyles, 
still grinning defiance at Time. In the blue 
overhead, which no roof shut from view, a 
seagull would occasionally flash by with the 
same strong flight that the eyes of the Vikings, 
whose barrows once dotted the low islands of 
this western coast, used to follow with sym- 
pathetic gaze. Wrens have built their nests 
in plundered niche and idle capital. The 
rooks, arraying themselves in sombre semi- 
circle along some hollow chancel arch, cawed 
reminiscent vespers. And little boys and girls 
from Barrow, joyous mites of humanity not 
yet smelted into the industrial mass, tried 
leaping- matches from the stumps of mossy 
pillars and ran races through nave and cloister. 
The wooden clogs of these lively youngsters 
have left their marks on prostrate slab and 
effigy, even on " the stone abbot " and " the 
cross-legged knight," much to the displeasure 
of the custodian, — a man who so truly cares 
for his abbey, the legal property of the Duke 
of Devonshire, that he has purchased two of 
the chief antiquarian works upon Furness 
in order that he may thoroughly acquaint 
himself with its history. It was he who 

86 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

told us that many of the empty stone cof- 
fins had been carried away by the farmers 
of the neighbourhood to serve as horse- 
troughs, and that in their barn walls might 
be seen here and there sculptured blocks 
of red sandstone quite above the apprecia- 
tion of calves and heifers. He told how he 
had shown " Professor Ruskin" about the 
ruins, and how, at Ruskin's request, Mrs. 
Severn had sent him from Brantwood seeds 
of the Italian toad-flax to be planted here. 
He lent us his well-thumbed folios, West's 
" Antiquities of Furness" and " Beck's An- 
nates Furnessienses," so that, sitting under 
the holly-shade in the Abbey Hotel garden, 
with a " starry multitude of daisies " at our 
feet, we could pore at our ease over that 
strange story, a tale of greatness that is told, 
and now, save for those lofty ribs and arches 
so red against the verdure, nothing but a tale. 
Our readings would be pleasurably inter- 
rupted toward the close of the afternoon by the 
advent of tea, brought to us in the garden, and 
the simultaneous arrival of a self-invited robin. 

"Not like a beggar is he come, 
But enters as a looked-for guest, 
Confiding in his ruddy breast." 
87 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

We tossed crumbs to him all the more gaily 
for the fancy that his ancestors were among 
the pensioners of the abbey in the day of its 
supremacy. For the monks of Furness main- 
tained an honourable reputation for hospital- 
ity from that mid- thirteenth- century begin- 
ning, when the Grey Brothers from Normandy 
first erected the grave, strong, simple walls of 
their Benedictine foundation in this deep and 
narrow vale, to the bitter end in 1537. Mean- 
while they had early discarded the grey habit 
of the Benedictines for the white of the Cis- 
tercians, and their abbot had become " lord 
of the liberties of Furness," exercising an 
almost regal sway in his peninsula, with power 
of life and death, with armed forces at com- 
mand, and with one of the richest incomes of 
the kingdom under his control. With wealth 
had come luxury. The buildings, which 
filled the whole breadth of the vale, had 
forgotten their Cistercian austerity in a pro- 
fusion of ornament. Within " the strait en- 
closure," encompassing church and cloisters, 
the little syndicate of white- vested monks not 
only chanted and prayed, transcribed and 
illuminated manuscripts, taught the children 
of their tenants and entertained the stranger, 
' 88 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

but planned financial operations on a large 
scale. For outside this, the holy wall, was 
another, shutting in over threescore acres of 
fertile land which the lay brothers, far exceed- 
ing the clerical monks in number, kept well 
tilled. Here were mill, granary, bakehouse, 
malt-kiln, brewery, fish-pond; and beyond 
stretched all Furness, where the abbey raised 
its cattle, sheep and horses, made salt, smelted 
its iron, and gathered its rents. 

Few of the monastic establishments had 
so much to lose, but Furness was surrendered 
to the commissioners of Henry VIII with 
seemingly no resistance. The Earl of Sussex 
reported to his greedy master that he found 
the Lord Abbot " of a very facile and ready 
mynde," while the prior, who had been a 
monk in that house for fifty years, was " de- 
crepted and aged." Yet it may be noted 
that of the thirty- three monks whom Sussex 
found in possession, only thirty signed the 
deed of surrender. On the fate of the three 
history is silent, save for a brief entry to the 
effect that two were imprisoned in Lancaster 
Castle. There is no record of their libera- 
tion. The monks who made their submis- 
sion were granted small pensions. The abbot 

89 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

received the rectory of Dalton, so near the 
desecrated abbey that he might have heard, 
to his torment, the crash of its falling towers. 
But there is room to hope that in those cruel 
dungeons of Lancaster two men died because 
they would not cringe. We do not know, and 
it was in vain we hunted through the moon- 
light for the ghost of that mysterious thirty- 
third, who, too, might have a gallant tale 
to tell. 

The region abounds in points of interest. 
Romney, the painter, is buried in the church- 
yard of Dalton, his native place. Beautiful 
for situation is Conishead Priory, " the Para- 
dise of Furness," once a house of the Black 
Canons and now a much-vaunted Hydro- 
pathic, for, in the stately language of the 
eighteenth- century antiquary, Thomas West, 
" iEsculapius is seldom invited to Furness, 
but Hygeia is more necessary than formerly." 

Near the banks of the Duddon stands 
Broughton Tower, with its legend of how the 
manor, in possession of the family from time 
immemorial, was lost by Sir Thomas Brough- 
ton — and this was the way of it. In 1487 
Lambert Simnel, claiming to be the son of the 
murdered Clarence, sailed over from Ireland, 

90 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

where he had been crowned by the sister of 
Richard III, to dispute the new throne of 
Henry VII. Among his supporters were the 
Earl of Lincoln, Lord Lovel of Oxfordshire, 
and Lord Geraldine with an Irish force; but 
it was the general of his two thousand Bur- 
gundian mercenaries, " bold Martin Swart," 
who is credited with having given name to 
Swarthmoor, where the invaders encamped. 
Sir Thomas joined them with a small body 
of retainers and, in the crushing defeat that 
followed, was probably left dead upon the 
field. But legend says that two of the Eng- 
lish leaders escaped, — Lord Lovel to his own 
house in Oxfordshire, where he hid in a secret 
chamber and perished there of hunger, and 
Sir Thomas to his faithful tenantry, who for 
years concealed him in their huts and sheep- 
folds, and when he died, white-haired, 
wrapped him in his own conquered banner, 
and gave him a burial worthy of his race. 

But our associations with Swarthmoor were 
of peace and not of war. Our pilgrimage 
thither was made for the sake of Mistress Fell 
of Swarthmoor Hall and of George Fox, her 
second husband, who established hard by 
what is said to be the first meeting-house of 

91 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

Friends in England. Quitting the train at 
Lindal, a few miles above the abbey, we found 
ourselves in the rich iron country, " the Peru 
of Furness." It must be the reddest land 
this side of sunset. Even the turnips and 
potatoes, we were told, come red out of the 
ground. I know that we tramped amazedly 
on, over a red road, past red trees and build- 
ings, with a red stream running below, and 
the uncanniest red men, red from cap to shoe, 
rising like Satan's own from out the earth to 
tramp along beside us. The road was deeply 
hedged, airless and viewless, and we were 
glad when we had left three miles of it behind, 
though the village of Swarthmoor, at which 
we had then arrived, proved to be one of those 
incredibly squalid English villages that make 
the heart sick. Between wide expanses of 
sweet green pasture, all carefully walled in, 
with strict warnings against trespass, ran two 
or three long, parallel stone streets, swarming 
with children and filthy beyond excuse. The 
lambs had space and cleanliness about them, 
soft turf to lie upon, pure air to breathe, 
but the human babies crawled and tumbled 
on that shamefully dirty pavement, along 
which a reeking beer wagon was noisily jolt- 

92 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

ing from " public " to " public." Farther 
down our chosen street, which soon slipped 
into a lane, there were tidier homes and more 
sanitary conditions. Yet even Swarthmoor 
Hall, the fine old Tudor mansion which rose 
across the fields beyond, had a somewhat un- 
inviting aspect. There were broken panes 
in the windows, and the cows had made the 
dooryards too much their own. The present 
proprietors, who, we were assured, value the 
old place highly, and had refused repeated 
offers for it from the Society of Friends, 
rent it to a farmer. The housekeeper, not 
without a little grumbling, admitted us, and 
showed us about the spacious rooms with 
their dark oak panelling, their richly carven 
mantels, their windows that look seaward 
over Morecambe Bay and inland to the Conis- 
ton mountains. The hall which Judge Fell — 
that wise and liberal man, tolerant beyond 
his time — allowed the Friends to use for 
their weekly meetings, is a room of goodly 
proportions, with flagged floor and timbered 
roof. In the dining-room window stands a 
simple deal desk once belonging to George 
Fox, but that upper door through which he 
used to preach to the throng in orchard and 

93 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

meadow is now walled up. As we, departing, 
looked back at the house, large, plain, three- 
storied, covered with grey stucco, we noted 
how right up on the chimney, in the alien 
fellowship of the chimney-pots, flourished 
a goodly green yew, sown by passing wind 
or bird. The housekeeper, who had waxed 
so gracious that she accompanied us for a few 
steps on our way, said she had lived in Swarth- 
moor thirty- four years and had always seen 
the yew looking much as it did now, but that 
an old man of the neighbourhood remem- 
bered it in his boyhood as only finger- long. 
It had never, so far as she could tell, been pro- 
vided by mortal hand with earth or water, 
but grew by some inner grace, a housetop 
sign and signal. 

Many hallowed memories cluster about 
that old Elizabethan mansion. It was in 
1632 that Judge Fell brought thither his 
bride, Margaret Askew, sixteen years his 
junior. She was a descendant of Anne 
Askew, who, a beautiful woman of twenty- 
four, thoughtful and truthful, had been 
burned as a heretic, — one of the closing 
achievements of the reign of Henry VIII. I 
saw her," reports a bystander, " and must 

94 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

needs confess of Mistress Askew, now departed 
to the Lord, that the day before her execution, 
and the same day also, she had on an angel's 
countenance, and a smiling face; though 
when the hour of darkness came, she was so 
racked that she could not stand, but was 
holden up between two Serjeants." 

It was then that the Lord Chancellor — 
who previously, when even the callous jailer 
had refused to rack the delicate body further, 
had thrown off his gown and worked the 
torture- engine with his own hands — offered 
her the king's pardon if she would recant, 
receiving in reply only the quiet words, " I 
came not hither to deny my Lord and 
Master." 

It is not easy for us who read to echo the 
prayer of her who suffered: 

"Lord, I Thee desyre. 

For that they do to me, 
Let them not taste the hyre 
Of their inyquyte." 

No wonder that Margaret Fell, with such 
a history in her heart, should have lent a 
ready ear to the doctrines of the " Children 
of Light," as the people dubbed them, the 
" Friends of Truth," as they called them- 

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selves, the " Quakers," whose prime conten- 
tion was for liberty of conscience. 

She had been married twenty years when 
George Fox first appeared at Swarthmoor 
Hall, where all manner of " lecturing minis- 
ters " were hospitably entertained. Three 
weeks later, Judge Fell, a grave man not 
far from sixty, was met, as he was riding 
home from circuit, by successive parties of 
gentlemen, " a deal of the captains and 
great ones of the country," who had come 
out to tell him that his family were " all 
bewitched." Home he came in wrath, but 
his wife soothed him as good wives know 
how, — had the nicest of dinners made ready, 
and sat by him, chatting of this and that, 
while he ate. 

" At night," says her own account, " George 
Fox arrived ; and after supper, when my hus- 
band was sitting in the parlour, I asked if he 
might come in. My husband said yes. So 
George walked into the room without any 
compliment. The family all came in, and 
presently he began to speak. He spoke very 
excellently, as ever I heard him; and opened 
Christ's and the Apostles' practices. ... If 
all England had been there, I thought they 

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could not have denied the truth of these things. 
And so my husband came to see clearly the 
truth of what he spake." 

The next First-day the meeting of the 
Friends was held at Swarthmoor Hall on 
Judge Fell's own invitation, though he him- 
self went, as usual, to "the Steeplehouse." 
The spirit of persecution was soon abroad, 
and one day, when the Judge was absent on 
circuit, Fox, while speaking in the church, 
was set upon, knocked down, trampled, 
beaten, and finally whipped out of town. On 
Judge Fell's return, he dealt with the Friend's 
assailants as common rioters. The Judge 
held, however, his mother's faith to the end, 
never becoming a member of the Society. 
He died in the year of Cromwell's death, 
1658, and was buried by torchlight under the 
family pew in Ulverston church. "He was 
a merciful man to God's people," wrote his 
widow, adding that, though not a Friend, he 
"sought after God in the best way that was 
made known to him." 

Meanwhile Margaret Fell had become a 

leader among the Children of Light. Twice 

she wrote to Cromwell in behalf of their cause, 

and again and again to Charles II, with whom 

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she pleaded face to face. Now that her hus- 
band's protection was withdrawn, persecu- 
tion no longer spared her, and she, like Fox 
and many another of the Society, came to 
know well the damp and chilly dungeons 
of Lancaster Castle, — that stern prison of 
North Lancashire which may be viewed afar 
off from the ominous height of Weeping Hill. 

"Thousands, as toward yon old Lancastrian Towers, 
A prison's crown, along this way they passed, 
For lingering durance or quick death with shame, 
From this bare eminence thereon have cast 
Their first look — blinded as tears fell in showers 
Shed on their chains." 

Refusing, as a Quaker must needs refuse, 
to take the oath of supremacy, Mistress Fell 
stood her trial in 1663, her four daughters 
beside her. Her arguments irritated the 
judge into exclaiming that she had "an ever- 
lasting tongue," and he condemned her to 
imprisonment for life, with confiscation of all 
her property to the Crown. But after some 
five years of Lancaster's grim hospitality 
she was released, and forthwith set out on a 
series of visits to those English jails in which 
Quakers were immured. It was not until 
eleven years after Judge Fell's death that she 

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married George Fox. The courtship is sum- 
marised in Fox's "Journal": "I had seen 
from the Lord a considerable time before that 
I should take Margaret Fell to be my wife; 
and when I first mentioned it to her she felt 
the answer from God thereto." Yet after 
the marriage, as before, they pursued, in the 
main, their separate paths of preaching, 
journeying, and imprisonment. It was seven 
years before illness brought Fox to Swarth- 
moor, which had been restored to the family, 
for a brief rest. About a quarter of a mile 
from the mansion, stood a dwelling-house in 
its three or four acres of land. This modest 
estate Fox purchased and gave it "to the 
Lord, for the service of his sons and daughters 
and servants called Quakers. . . . And also 
my ebony bedstead, with painted curtains, 
and the great elbow-chair that Robert Widder 
sent me, and my great sea case with the bottles 
in it I do give to stand in the house as heir- 
looms, when the house shall be made use of 
as a meeting- place, that Friends may have 
a bed to lie on, a chair to sit on, and a bottle 
to hold a little water for drink." He adds: 
"Slate it and pave the way to it and about it, 
that Friends may go dry to their meeting. 

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You may let any poor, honest Friend live in 
the house, and so let it be for the Lord's ser- 
vice, to the end of the world." 

A deep hawthorn lane, winding to the 
left, led us to that apostolic meeting-house, 
well-nigh hidden from the road by its high, 
grey, ivy- topped wall. We passed through 
a grassy outer court into an inner enclosure 
thick-set with larches, hollies, and wild cherry. 
The paths are paved. Luxuriant ivy curtains 
porch and wall, and clambers up over the low 
tower. Above the door is inscribed : 

Ex dono G. F., 1682. 

The meeting-room within is of Quaker plain- 
ness, with drab- tinted walls. The settees 
are hard and narrow, though a few "at the 
top" are allowed the creature comforts of 
cushions. Only the posts are left of the ebony 
bedstead, but two elbow-chairs of carven oak, 
a curiously capacious and substantial travel- 
ling-chest, and a Bible still are shown as Fox's 
personal belongings. The Bible is a black- 
letter folio of 1541, the Treacle Bible, open 
at the third chapter of Jeremiah, where, in 
the last verse, comes the query : "Is not there 
any tryacle in Gylyad?" 

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But Lancashire has other saints no less 
holy than those dear to Protestant and 
Quaker memory. Surely martyrs, irrespec- 
tive of the special phase of the divine idea 
for which they gladly give up their bodies 
to torture and to death, are the truest heroes 
of history. 

"For a tear is an intellectual thing, 
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King, 
And the bitter groan of the Martyr's woe 
Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow." 

This remote county, especially the north 
with its perilous bogs and rugged fells, clung 
to the mother faith. Many of its old families 
are still Catholic; many a Tudor mansion 
can show its " priest- hole " from which, per- 
haps, some hidden Jesuit has been dragged 
to the dungeon or the scaffold. We jour- 
neyed up from Manchester on a sunny after- 
noon, for love of one of these, to the beautiful 
valley of the Ribble, rich in manifold tradi- 
tions. Our time was short, but we climbed 
to the keep of Clitheroe Castle, ruined for its 
loyalty to Charles I, and viewed that wide 
prospect whose most impressive feature is the 
witch-storied stretch of Pendle Hill. On 
that long level range the famous witches of 

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Lancashire used to hold their unseemly orgies, 
hooting and yowling about Malkin Tower, 
their capital stronghold, whose evil stones 
were long since cast down and scattered. 
Peevish neighbours they were, at the best, 
ready on the least provocation to curse the cow 
from giving milk and the butter from coming 
in the churn, but on Pendle Hill the broom- 
stick battalion was believed to dance in un- 
couth circle about caldrons seething with 
hideous ingredients and to mould little wax 
images of their enemies who would peak and 
pine as these effigies wasted before the flames, 
or shudder with fierce shoots of agony as red- 
hot needles were run into the wax. What 
were honest folk to do ? It was bad enough 
to have the bride-cake snatched away from 
the wedding-feast and to find your staid 
Dobbin all in a lather and dead lame at sun- 
rise from his wild gallop, under one of these 
"secret, black and midnight hags," to Malkin 
Tower, but when you were saddled and bridled 
and ridden yourself, when the hare that you 
had chased and wounded turned suddenly 
into your own wife panting and covered with 
blood, when your baby was stolen from the 
cradle to be served up in the Devil's Sacra- 

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ment of the Witches' Sabbath, it was time to 
send for one of King James's " witch-finders." 
So the poor old crones, doubled up and corded 
thumb to toe, were flung into the Calder to 
see whether they would sink or swim, or sent 
to where the fagot- piles awaited them in the 
courtyard of Lancaster Gaol, or even — so 
the whisper goes — flung into their own lurid 
bonfires on Pendle Hill. But still strange 
shadows, as of furious old arms that scatter 
curses, are to be seen on those heather- purpled 
slopes, and from the summit black thunder- 
storms crash down with supernatural sudden- 
ness and passion. 

Our driver was a subdued old man, with 
an air of chronic discouragement. He met 
the simplest questions, about trains, about 
trees, about climate, with a helpless shake of 
the head and the humble iteration: "I can't 
say. I'm no scholard. I never went to 
school. I can't read." He eyed Pendle Hill, 
standing blue in a flood of sunshine, with ob- 
vious uneasiness, and asked if we thought 
there really were "such folk as witches." As 
we drove up the long avenues of Stonyhurst, 
our goal, that imposing seat of learning seemed 
to deepen his meek despondency. He mur- 

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mured on his lofty perch : "I never went to 
school." 

Stonyhurst, the chief Catholic college of 
England, was originally located at St. Omer's 
in France. Over sea to St. Omer's the 
Catholic gentry of Elizabethan times used 
to send their sons. There the exiled lads 
vainly chanted litanies for England's con- 
version, their church door bearing in golden 
letters the fervent prayer: "Jesu, Jesu, con- 
verte Angliam, fiat, fiat." The Elizabethan 
sonneteer, William Habington, who describes 
"a holy man" as one who erects religion on 
the Catholic foundation, "knowing it a ruin- 
ous madness to build in the air of a private 
spirit, or on the sands of any new schism," 
was a St. Omer's boy. Nineteen of those 
quaintly uniformed lads, blue- coated, red- 
vested, leather- trousered, afterwards died on 
the scaffold or in prison, usually as Jesuit 
priests who had slipped into England against 
Elizabethan law. 

During the latter half of the eighteenth 
century, when the strong feeling against the 
Jesuits led to their banishment from France 
and finally to the temporary suppression of 
the order, the school began its wanderings, — 

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from St. Omer's to Bruges, thence to Liege, 
and at last, in 1794, from Liege to England, 
where one of the alumni presented the home- 
less seminary with the fine estate of Stony- 
hurst. In this secluded, healthful situation 
there now stands a prosperous college, with 
dormitories for two hundred students, with 
well -equipped academic buildings, a prepar- 
atory school, and a great farm which of it- 
self maintains the institution. 

Stonyhurst has many treasures, — illumi- 
nated missals, Caxton editions, a St. John's 
Gospel in Gaelic script said to have been 
found in the tomb of St. Cuthbert, relics 
of "Blessed Thomas More," original por- 
traits of the Stuarts, — including the winsome 
picture of Bonny Prince Charlie as a child, — 
but the object of our quest was a little manu- 
script volume of Robert Southwell's poems. 
Of course the porter knew nothing about it, 
though he strove to impart the impression 
that this was the only matter in the universe 
on which he was uninformed, and "the teach- 
ing fathers " were still absent for their summer 
holiday; but a gentle old lay brother finally 
hunted out for us the precious book, choicely 
bound in vellum and delicately written in an 

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unknown hand, with corrections and inser- 
tions in the young priest's own autograph. 
This Stonyhurst manuscript gives the best 
and only complete text for the strange, touch- 
ing, deeply devotional poems of Father South- 
well, — the text on which Grosart's edition 
rests. It is supposed that they were written 
out for him by a friend while he lay a prisoner 
in the Tower, and that in the intervals be- 
tween the brutalities of torture to which that 
most sensitive organism was again and again 
subjected, he put to his book these finishing 
touches, — only a few months and weeks 
before he was executed at Tyburn by a blun- 
derer who adjusted the noose so badly that 
the martyr "several times made the sign of 
the Cross while he was hanging." 

Our eyes filled as we deciphered the faded 
Elizabethan script: 

"God's spice I was, and pounding was my due; 
In fading breath my incense savored best; 
Death was the meane, my kyrnell to renewe; 
By loppynge shott I upp to heavenly rest. 



'Rue not my death, rejoice at my repose; 

It was no death to me, but to my woe; 
The budd was opened to lett out the rose, 

The cheynes unloos'd to let the captive goe.' 
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As we were driving on to Whalley, to pay 
our tribute of honour to yet one shining 
memory more, the summit of Pendle Hill 
suddenly wrapped itself in sable cloud, and 
its haunting vixens let loose upon us the most 
vehement pelt of rain, diversified with light- 
ning-jags and thunder- crashes, that it was 
ever my fortune to be drenched withal. One 
of the Lancashire witches is buried in Whalley 
churchyard under a massive slab which is 
said to heave occasionally. I think I saw 
it shaking with malicious glee as we came 
spattering up the flooded path, looking as if 
we had ourselves been " swum " in the Calder. 

Whalley church, one of the most curious 
and venerable parish churches of England, 
shelters the ashes of John Paslew, last Abbot 
of Whalley. Upon the simple stone are cut 
a floriated cross and chalice, with the words 
" Jesu fill dei miserere mei." Only the few- 
est traces, chief of which is a beautiful gate- 
way with groined roof, remain of this great 
abbey, one of the richest in the north of Eng- 
land, charitable, hospitable, with an especially 
warm welcome for wandering minstrels. Its 
walls have been literally levelled to the ground, 
like those of the rival Cistercian foundation at 

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Sawley, a few miles above. But the "White 
Church under the Leigh," believed to have 
been originally established by the missionary 
Paulinus in the seventh century, preserves 
the abbey choir stalls, whose crocketed pin- 
nacles tower to the top of the chancel. Their 
misereres are full of humour and spirit. An 
old woman beating her husband with a ladle 
is one of the domestic scenes that tickled the 
merry monks of Whalley. We could have 
lingered long in this ancient church for its 
wealth of fine oak carving, its pew fashioned 
like a cage, its heraldic glass, and, in the 
churchyard, the three old, old crosses with 
their interlacing Runic scrolls, one of which, 
when a witch read it backward, would do her 
the often very convenient service of making 
her invisible. But we had time only for the 
thought of Abbot Paslew, who, refusing to 
bow to the storm like the Abbot of Furness, 
had raised a large body of men and gone to 
arms for the defence of the English monas- 
teries against the royal robber. He was a 
leader in the revolt of 1537, known as the Pil- 
grimage of Grace. The Abbot of Sawley, 
William Trafford, old jealousies forgotten, 
took the field with him. But monks were 

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no match for Henry VIII's generals, the re- 
bellion was promptly crushed, the Abbot of 
Sawley was hanged at Lancaster, and Abbot 
Paslew was taken, with a refinement of ven- 
geance, back to Whalley and gibbeted there, 
in view of the beautiful abbey over which he 
had borne sway for thirty years. The coun- 
try folk had depended upon it for alms, for 
medical aid, for practical counsel, for spiritual 
direction, and we may well believe that, as 
they looked on at the execution, their hearts 
were hot against the murderers of him 
who, when he grasped the sword, had as- 
sumed the title of Earl of Poverty. The 
mound where he suffered is well remembered 
to this day. 

The flying hours had been crowded with 
impressions, tragic, uncanny, pitiful, and we 
had yet, in going to the station, to run the 
gantlet of a tipsy town, for it was a holiday. 
We had found Clitheroe drinking, earlier in 
the afternoon, and now we found Whalley 
drunk. One unsteady individual, wagging 
his head from side to side and stretching out 
a pair of wavering arms, tried to bar my 
progress. 

"Wh-where be g-goin' ?" he asked. 
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"To the train," I answered curtly, dodg- 
ing by. 

He sat down on the wall and wept aloud. 

"T-to the tr-train! Oh, the L-Lord 
bl-bless you! The g-good L— Lord bl-bless 
you all the w-way!" 

And the last we saw and heard of him, he 
was still feebly shaking his hands after us 
and sobbing maudlin benedictions. 

II. Cheshire 

Drayton the poet once took it upon him 
to assure Cheshire that what was true of 
Lancashire was true also of her: 

"Thy natural sister shee — and linkt unto thee so 
That Lancashire along with Cheshire still doth goe." 

From that great backbone of England, the 
Pennine Range, both these counties fall away 
to the west, but Cheshire quickly opens into 
the Shropshire plain. At the northeast it has 
its share in the treasures of the deep coal- 
field rent across by the Pennines, and here, 
too, are valuable beds of copper. In this 
section of the county cluster the silk towns, 
among them Macclesfield, the chief seat in 

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England of this manufacture, and Congleton, 
whose character we will trust has grown 
more spiritual with time. For in 1617 one 
of the village wags tugged a bear into the 
pulpit at the hour of service, and it was a full 
twelvemonth before the church was recon- 
secrated and worship resumed. Indeed, the 
Congleton folk had such a liking for bear- 
baiting or bear- dancing, or whatever sport it 
was their town bear afforded them, that when 
a few years later this poor beast died, it is 
told that 

"living far from Godly fear 
They sold the Church Bible to buy a bear." 

The old Cheshire, everywhere in evidence 
with its timber- and- plaster houses, distracts 
the mind from this new industrial Cheshire. 
We visited Macclesfield, but I forgot its fac- 
tories, its ribbons and sarcenets, silks and 
satins and velvets, because of the valiant 
Leghs. Two of them sleep in the old Church 
of St. Michael, under a brass that states in 
a stanza ending as abruptly as human life 
itself : 

"Here lyeth the body of Perkin a Legh 
That for King Richard the death did die, 
Betray 'd for righteousness; 
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And the bones of Sir Peers his sone, 
That with King Henrie the fift did wonne 
In Paris." 

I have read that Sir Perkin was knighted 
at Crecy and Sir Peers at Agincourt, and that 
they were kinsmen of Sir Uryan Legh of Ad- 
lington, the Spanish Lady's Love. 

"Will ye hear a Spanish Lady, 

How she wooed an Englishman ? 
Garments gay and rich as may be, 
Decked with jewels, she had on." 

This Sir Uryan was knighted by Essex at 
the siege of Calais, and it was then, appar- 
ently, that the poor Spanish lady, beautiful 
and of high degree, lost her heart. The 
Elizabethan ballad, whose wood-cut shows 
a voluminously skirted dame entreating an 
offish personage in a severely starched ruff, 
tells us that she had fallen, by some chance 
of. war, into his custody. 

"As his prisoner there he kept her; 
In his hands her life did lie; 
Cupid's bands did tie them faster 
By the liking of an eye. 



"But at last there came commandment 
For to set all ladies free, 
With their jewels still adorned, 
None to do them injury." 
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But freedom was no boon to her. 

"Gallant Captain, take some pity 
On a woman in distress; 
Leave me not within this city 
For to die in heaviness." 

In vain he urges that he is the enemy of her 
country. 

"Blessed be the time and season 

That you came on Spanish ground; 
If you may our foes be termed, 
Gentle foes we have you found." 

He suggests that she would have no diffi- 
culty in getting a Spanish husband, but she 
replies that Spaniards are "fraught with 
jealousy." 

"Still to serve thee day and night 
My mind is prest; 
The wife of every Englishman 
Is counted blest." 

He objects that it is not the custom of Eng- 
lish soldiers to be attended by women. 

"I will quickly change myself, 
If it be so, 
And like a page will follow thee 
Where e'er thou go." 

But still he makes excuse: 
8 113 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

"I have neither gold nor silver 
To maintain thee in this case, 
And to travel is great charges, 
As you know, in every place." 

She puts her fortune at his disposal, but he 
has hit upon a new deterrent : 

"On the seas are many dangers, 
Many storms do there arise, 
Which will be to ladies dreadful 
And force tears from watry eyes." 

She implies that she would gladly die, even 
of seasickness, for his sake, and at that the 
truth breaks forth: 

"Courteous lady, leave this folly; 

Here comes all that breeds this strife: — 
I in England have already 
A sweet woman to my wife. 

"I will not falsify my vow 
For gold nor gain, 
Nor yet for all the fairest dames 
That live in Spain." 

Her reply, with its high Spanish breeding, 
puts his blunt English manners to shame: 

"Oh how happy is that woman 
That enjoys so true a friend. 
Many happy days God lend her! 
Of my suit I'll make an end. 

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"Commend me to that gallant lady; 
Bear to her this chain of gold; 
With these bracelets for a token; 
Grieving that I was so bold. 



"I will spend my days in prayer, 

Love and all her laws defy; 
In a nunnery I will shroud me, 
Far from any company. 

"But e'er my prayer have an end, 
Be sure of this, — 
To pray for thee and for thy Love 
I will not miss. 



"Joy and true prosperity 

Remain with thee!" 
"The like fall unto thy share, 

Most fair lady!" 

This ballad, which Shakespeare might 
have bought for a penny "at the Looking- 
glass on London bridge" and sung to the 
tune of "Flying Fame," is still a favourite 
throughout Cheshire. 

But we are driving from Macclesfield up 
into the Cheshire highlands, — velvety hills, 
green to the top, all smoothed off as trim as 
sofa- cushions and adorned with ruffles of foli- 
age. Nature is a neat housekeeper even here 
in the wildest corner of Cheshire. What was 

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once savage forest is now tranquil grazing- 
ground, and the walls that cross the slopes 
and summits, dividing the sward into separate 
cattle-ranges, run in tidy parallels. But most 
of the county is flat, — so flat that it all can 
be viewed from Alderly Edge, a cliff six hun- 
dred and fifty feet high, a little to the west of 
Macclesfield. Along the Mersey, the Lan- 
castrian boundary, rise the clustered chimneys 
of Cheshire's cotton towns. Yet cotton is 
not the only industry of this northern strip. 
The neighbourhood of Manchester makes 
market-gardening profitable; potatoes and 
onions flourish amain; and Altrincham, a 
pleasant little place where many of the Man- 
chester mill- owners reside, proudly contributes 
to their felicity its famous specialty of the 
" green- top carrot." 

I suppose these cotton-lords only smile dis- 
dainfully at the tales of the old wizard who 
keeps nine hundred and ninety- nine armed 
steeds in the deep caverns of Alderly Edge, 
waiting for war. What is his wizardry to 
theirs! But I wonder if any of them are 
earning a sweeter epitaph than the one which 
may be read in Alderly Church to a rector, 
Edward Shipton, M.A., — it might grieve his 

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gentle ghost, should we omit those letters, — 
who died in 1630: 

"Here lies below an aged sheep-heard clad in heavy clay, 
Those stubborne weedes which come not of unto the 

judgment day. 
Whilom hee led and fed with welcome paine his careful 

sheepe, 
He did not feare the mountaines' highest tops, nor vallies 

deep. 
That he might save from hurte his fearful flocks, which 

were his care. 
To make them strong he lost his strengthe, and fasted for 

their fare. 
How they might feed, and grow, and prosper, he did 

daily tell, 
Then having shew'd them how to feed, he bade them all 

farewell." 

Good men have come out of Cheshire. In 
the Rectory House of Alderly was born Dean 
Stanley. Bishop Heber is a Cheshire worthy, 
as are the old chroniclers, Higden and Hol- 
inshead. Even the phraseology of Cheshire 
wills I have fancied peculiarly devout, as, for 
instance, Matthew Legh's, in 1512: 

"Imprimis, I bequeath my sole to almightie god and 
to his blessed moder seynt Mary, and to all the selestiall 
company in heaven, and my bodi to be buried in the 
Chappell of Seynt Anne within the parish Church of 
Handley or there where it shall please almightie god to 
call for me at his pleasure." 

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The men of Cheshire have on occasion, 
and conspicuously during the Civil War, ap- 
proved themselves for valour. When the 
royalist garrison of Beeston Castle, the ' ' other 
hill " of this pancake county, was at last forced 
to accept terms from the Roundhead troops, 
there was "neither meat nor drink found in 
the Castle, but only a piece of a turkey pie, 
two biscuits, and a live pea- cock and pea- 
hen." 

Yet Cheshire is famed rather for the virtues 
of peace, — for thrift, civility, and neigh- 
bourly kindness. An early- seventeenth- 
century "Treatise on Cheshire" says: "The 
people of the country are of a nature very 
gentle and courteous, ready to help and fur- 
ther one another; and that is to be seen 
chiefly in the harvest time, how careful are 
they of one another." A few years later, in 
1616, a native of the county wrote of it not 
only as producing "the best cheese of all 
Europe," but as blessed with women "very 
friendly and loving, painful in labour, and in 
all other kind of housewifery expert." 

The accepted chronicler of Cheshire woman- 
hood, however, is Mrs. Gaskell. As we lin- 
gered along the pleasant streets of Knutsford 

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— her Cranford — and went in and out ot 
the quiet shops, we blessed her memory for 
having so delectably distilled the lavender 
essences of that sweet, old-fashioned village 
life. She had known it and loved it all the 
way from her motherless babyhood, and she 
wrote of it with a tender humour that has 
endeared it to thousands. Our first Knuts- 
ford pilgrimage was to her grave beside the 
old Unitarian chapel, for both her father and 
her husband were clergymen of that faith. 
We had seen in Manchester — her Drumble 

— the chapel where Mr. Gaskell ministered, 
and had read her "Mary Barton," that sym- 
pathetic presentation of the life of Lancashire 
mill-hands which awoke the anger and per- 
haps the consciences of the manufacturers. 
She served the poor of Manchester not with 
her pen alone, but when our war brought 
in its train the cotton famine of 1862-63, she 
came effectively to their relief by organizing 
sewing- rooms and other means of employ- 
ment for women. Husband and wife, ful- 
filled of good works, now rest together in that 
sloping little churchyard which we trod with 
reverent feet. 

It must be confessed that Knutsford is 
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A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

becoming villaized. It has even suffered the 
erection, in memory of Mrs. Gaskell, of an 
ornate Italian tower, which Deborah cer- 
tainly would not have approved. It was not 
May-day, so we could not witness the Knuts- 
ford revival of the May-queen court, and we 
looked in vain for the Knutsford wedding 
sand. On those very rare occasions when 
a bridegroom can be found, the kith and kin 
of the happy pair make a welcoming path for 
Hymen by trickling coloured sands through 
a funnel so as to form a pavement decoration 
of hearts, doves, true-love knots, and the like, 
each artist in front of his own house. But 
no minor disappointments could break the 
Cranford spell, which still held us as we drove 
out into the surrounding country. How 
sunny and serene! With what awe we 
passed the timbered mansions of the county 
families! What green hedgerows! What 
golden harvest- fields ! What pink roses 
clambering to the cottage- thatch ! What 
gardens, and what pastures on pastures, 
grazed over by sleek kine that called to mind 
Miss Matty's whimsical old lover and his 
"six and twenty cows, named after the dif- 
ferent letters of the alphabet." 

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A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

Here in central Cheshire we ought not to 
have been intent on scenery, but on salt, for 
of this, as of silk, our smiling county has 
almost a monopoly. And only too soon the 
blue day was darkened by the smoke of North- 
wich, the principal seat of the salt trade and 
quite the dirtiest town in the county. The 
valley of the Weaver, the river that crosses 
Cheshire about midway between its northern 
boundary, the Mersey, and its southern, the 
Dee, lias the richest salt-mines and brine- 
springs of England. The salt towns, whose 
chimneys belch blackness at intervals along 
the course of the stream, are seen at their best, 
or worst, in Northwich, though Nantwich, an 
ancient centre of this industry, has charming 
traditions of the village hymn that used to 
be sung about the flower- crowned pits, es- 
pecially the "Old Brine," on Ascension Day, 
in thanksgiving for the salt. We tried to take 
due note of railways and canals, docks and 
foundries, and the queer unevenness of the 
soil caused by the mining and the pumping 
up of brine, — such an uncertain site that 
the houses, though bolted, screwed, and but- 
tressed, continually sag and sink. The mines 
themselves are on the outskirts of the town, 

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and we looked at the ugly sheds and scaffold- 
ings above ground, and did our best to imagine 
the strange white galleries and gleaming pillars 
below. There was no time to go down be- 
cause it had taken our leisurely Knutsford 
coachman till ten o'clock to get his "bit of 
breakfast." Dear Miss Matty would have 
been gentle with him, and so we strove not to 
glower at his unbending back, but to gather 
in what we could, as he drove us to the train, 
of the beauties by the way. 

We left the salt to the care of the Weaver, 
which was duly bearing it on, white blocks, 
ruddy lumps, rock-salt and table-salt, to Run- 
corn and to Liverpool. We put the brine- pits 
out of mind, and enjoyed the lovely fresh- 
water meres, social resorts of the most amiable 
of ducks and the most dignified of geese, 
which dot the Cheshire landscape. We had 
visited Rostherne Mere on our way out, and 
caught a glint from the fallen church-bell 
which a Mermaid rings over those dim waters 
every Easter dawn. We paused at Lower 
Peover for a glimpse of its black-and-white 
timbered church, deeply impressive and 
almost unique as an architectural survival. 
Among its curiosities we saw a chest hollowed 

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out of solid oak with an inscription to the 
effect that any girl who can raise the lid with 
one arm is strong enough to be a Cheshire 
farmer's wife. Sturdy arms they needs must 
have, these Cheshire women, for the valley 
of the Weaver, like the more southerly Vale 
of Dee, is largely given up to dairy farms and 
to the production of cheeses. A popular song 
betrays the county pride: 

"A Cheshire man went o'er to Spain 
To trade in merchandise, 
And when arrived across the main 
A Spaniard there he spies. 

'"Thou Cheshire man,' quoth he, 'look here, — 
These fruits and spices fine. 
Our country yields these twice a year; 
Thou hast not such in thine.' 

"The Cheshire man soon sought the hold, 

Then brought a Cheshire cheese. 
'You Spanish dog, look here!' said he. 
'You have not such as these.' 

"'Your land produces twice a year 
Spices and fruits, you say, 
But such as in my hand I bear. 
Our land yields twice a day.'" 

But the best songs of Cheshire go to the 
music of the river Dee. We have all had our 
moments of envying its heart- free Miller. 

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A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

"There was a jolly Miller once 

Lived on the river Dee; 
He worked and sang from morn till night, 

No lark more blithe than he; 
And this the burden of his song 

Forever used to be: 
I care for nobody, no, not I, 

And nobody cares for me." 

Kingsley's tragic lyric of 

"Mary, go and call the cattle home 
Across the sands of Dee," 

reports too truly the perils of that wide estu- 
ary where Lycidas was lost. On the corre- 
sponding estuary of the Mersey stands Birken- 
head, the bustling modern port of Cheshire; 
but it was at Chester that Milton's college 
mate had embarked for another haven than 
the one he reached. 

Chester itself is to many an American 
tourist the old-world city first seen and best 
remembered. Liverpool and Birkenhead are 
of to-day, but Chester, walled, turreted, with 
its arched gateways, its timber- and- plaster 
houses, its gables and lattices, its quaint Rows, 
its cathedral, is the mediaeval made actual. 
The city abounds in memories of Romans, 
Britons, Saxons, of King Alfred who drove 

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A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

out the Danes, of King Edgar who, "toucht 
with imperious affection of glory," compelled 
six subject kings to row him up the Dee to 
St. John's Church, of King Charles who stood 
with the Mayor on the leads of the wall- tower 
now called by his name and beheld the defeat 
of the royal army on Rowton Moor. As we 
walked around the walls, — where, as every- 
where in the county, the camera sought in 
vain for a Cheshire cat, — we talked of the 
brave old city's "strange, eventful history," 
but if it had been in the power of a wish to 
recall any one hour of all its past, I would 
have chosen mine out of some long-faded 
Whitsuntide, that I might see a Miracle 
pageant in its medieval sincerity, — the tan- 
ners playing the tragedy of Lucifer's fall, 
perhaps, or the water-carriers the comedy of 
Noah's flood. 

III. Staffordshire 

This is the Black Country par excellence, — 
a county whose heraldic blazon should be the 
pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire 
by night. It belongs to the central plain of 
England, save on the northeast, where the 

125 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

lower end of the Pennine chain breaks into 
picturesque highlands. Its gently undulating 
reaches are still largely given over to agricul- 
ture, but the bulk of its population, the most 
of its energy and wealth, are concentrated in 
the manufacturing towns that so thickly stud 
the surface over its two coal-fields. The 
northern is the last of that long line of coal- 
measures running down from Lancashire; 
the southern is much larger, though not so 
workable, and extends across all South Staf- 
fordshire. Both north and south, iron in 
rich quantities is found with the coal, so that 
for many years Staffordshire controlled the 
iron trade of the world. Of late, South 
Wales and other regions are successfully dis- 
puting its supremacy. 

We had, in previous visits to England, 
crossed Staffordshire several times by train, 
and memory retained an unattractive impres- 
sion of netted railways, forests of factory chim- 
neys, and grimy miners sweethearting with 
rough pitgirls under smoke and cinders. If we 
must enter it now, the occasion seemed propi- 
tious for a trial of the automobile, — a mode of 
conveyance which we had deemed too sacrile- 
gious for the Border and the Lake Country. 

126 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

Toward ten o'clock on an August morning 
— for the chauffeur, like our Cheshire coach- 
man, could not be hurried over his "bit of 
breakfast" — we tucked ourselves and a con- 
fiding Shrewsbury lady into a snug motor- 
car, and away we sped through northeastern 
Shropshire across the county line. In a gasp 
or two the name Eccleshall glimmered 
through the dust that flew against our goggles. 
This little town has one of the finest churches 
in the county, but the frenzy of speed was on 
us, and we tore by. Suddenly we came upon 
the Trent, winding along, at what struck 
us as a contemptibly sluggish pace, down 
Staffordshire on its circuitous route to the 
Humber. We tooted our horn and honked 
up its western side to the Potteries. Here 
the machine suffered an attack of cramps, 
and while it was groaning and running around 
in a circle and pawing the air, we had our 
first opportunity to look about us. 

The region known as the Potteries, the 
chief seat of the earthenware manufactures 
of England, consists of a strip of densely 
populated land in this upper basin of the 
Trent, a strip some ten miles long by two 
miles broad, whose serried towns and villages 

127 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

give the aspect of one continuous street. 
Within this narrow district are over three 
hundred potteries, whose employees number 
nearly forty thousand, apart from the acces- 
sory industries of clay-grinding, bone-grind- 
ing, flint-grinding, and the like. It draws 
on its own beds of coal and iron, but the china- 
clay comes from Cornwall by way of Runcorn 
and the Grand Trunk Canal, while for flints 
it depends on the south coast of England and 
on France. Genius here is named Josiah 
Wedgwood. This inventor of fine porce- 
lains, whose "Queen's ware" gained him 
the title of "Queen's Potter," was born in 
1759 at Burslem, which had been making 
brown butter- pots as far back as the days of 
Charles I. When Burslem grew too small 
for his enterprise, Wedgwood established the 
pottery village of Etruria, to which the auto- 
mobile passionately refused to take us. It 
dashed us into Newcastle-under-Lyme, where 
we did not particularly want to go, and rushed 
barking by Stoke- under- Trent, the capital 
of the Potteries and also — though we had 
not breath to mention it — the birthplace of 
Dinah Mulock Craik. In the last town of 
the line, Longtown, our machine fairly balked, 

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A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

and the chauffeur with dignity retired under 
it. A crowd of keen-faced men and children 
gathered about us, while we ungoggled to 
observe the endless ranks of house -doors 
opening into baby-peopled passages, — and, 
looming through the murky air, the bulging 
ovens of the china factories. At last our 
monster snorted on again, wiggling up the 
hill sideways with a grace peculiar to itself 
and exciting vain hopes of a wreck in the 
hearts of our attendant urchins. It must 
have been the Potteries that disagreed with 
it, for no sooner were their files of chimmeys 
left behind than it set off at a mad pace for 
Uttoxeter, on whose outskirts we " alighted," 
like Royalty, for a wayside luncheon of sand- 
wiches, ale, and dust. 

Uttoxeter is no longer the idle little town 
that Hawthorne found it, when he made pil- 
grimage thither in honour of Dr. Johnson's 
penance, for the good Doctor, heart-troubled 
for fifty years because in boyhood he once 
refused to serve in his father's stead at the 
market bookstall, had doomed himself to 
stand, the whole day long, in the staring 
market-place, wind and rain beating against 
his bared grey head, " a central image 
9 129 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

of Memory and Remorse." Lichfield, Dr. 
Johnson's native city, commemorates this 
characteristic act by a bas-relief on the pedes- 
tal of the statue standing opposite the three- 
pillared house where the greatest of her sons 
was born. 

While our chauffeur, resting from his labours 
under the hedge, genially entertained the 
abuse of a drunken tramp who was accusing 
us all of luxury, laziness, and a longing to 
run down our fellowmen, my thoughts turned 
wistfully to Lichfield, lying due south, to 
whose " Queen of English Minsters" we were 
ashamed to present our modern hippogriff. 
I remembered waking there one autumnal 
morning, years ago, at the famous old inn of 
the Swan, and peering from my window to 
see that wooden bird, directly beneath it, 
flapping in a rainy gale. The cathedral rose 
before the mental vision, — the grace of its 
three spires; its wonderful west front with 
tiers of saints and prophets and archangels, 
"a very Te Deum in stone"; the delicate 
harmonies of colour and line within; the 
glowing windows of the Lady Chapel; the 
" heaven-loved innocence " of the two little 
sisters sculptured by Chantrey, and his kneel- 

130 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

ing effigy of a bishop so benignant even in 
marble that a passing child slipped from her 
mother's hand and knelt beside him to say 
her baby prayers. What books had been 
shown me there in that quiet library above 
the chapter- house ! I could still recall the 
richly illuminated manuscript of the "Can- 
terbury Tales," a volume of Dr. South's ser- 
mons with Dr. Johnson's rough, vigorous 
pencil-marks all up and down the margins, 
and, treasure of treasures, an eighth- century 
manuscript of St. Chad's Gospels. For this 
is St. Chad's cathedral, still his, though the 
successive churches erected on this site have 
passed like human generations, each building 
itself into the next. 

St. Chad, hermit and bishop, came from 
Ireland as an apostle to Mercia in the seventh 
century. Among his first converts were the 
king's two sons, martyred for their faith. 
Even in these far distant days his tradition 
is revered, and on Holy Thursday the choris- 
ters of the cathedral yet go in procession to 
St. Chad's Well, bearing green boughs and 
chanting. A century or so ago, the well was 
adorned with bright garlands for this festival. 
The boy Addison, whose father was Dean of 

131 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

Lichfield, may have gathered daffodils and 
primroses to give to good St. Chad. 

The ancient city has other memories. Far- 
quhar set the scene of his "Beaux' Stratagem" 
there. Major Andre knew those shaded 
walks. In the south transept of the cathe- 
dral is the sepulchre of Garrick, whose death, 
the inscription tells us, "eclipsed the gaiety 
of nations and impoverished the public stock 
of harmless pleasure." It may be recalled 
that Hawthorne found it "really pleasant" to 
meet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's tomb in 
the minster, and that Scott asserts there used 
to be, in "moated Lichfield's lofty pile," a 
monument to Marmion, whose castle stood a 
few miles to the southeast, at Tarn worth. 

But the motor-car, full-fed with gasoline, 
would brook no further pause. As self- 
important as John Hobs, the famous Tanner 
of Tarn worth whom "not to know was to 
know nobody," it stormed through Uttoxeter 
and on, outsmelling the breweries of Burton- 
on- Trent. Ducks, hens, cats, dogs, babies, 
the aged and infirm, the halt and the blind, 
scuttled to left and right. Policemen glared 
out at it from their "motor- traps" in the 
hedges. A group of small boys sent a rattle 

132 






A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

of stones against it. Rocester! Only three 
miles away were the ruins of the Cistercian 
Abbey of Croxden. We would have liked 
to see them, if only to investigate the story 
that the heart of King John is buried there, 
for we had never before heard that he had 
a heart; but while we were voicing our desire 
we had already crossed the Dove and whizzed 
into Derbyshire. 

Dovedale was our goal. This beautiful 
border district of Derby and Staffordshire 
abounds in literary associations. Near Ham 
Hall, whose grounds are said to have sug- 
gested to Dr. Johnson the "happy valley" 
in "Rasselas," and in whose grotto Congreve 
wrote his "Old Bachelor," stands the famous 
Isaak Walton Inn. The patron saint of the 
region is the Gentle Angler, who in these 
"flowery meads" and by these "crystal 
streams" loved to 

"see a black-bird feed her young, 
Or a laverock build her nest." 

Here he would raise his 

"low-pitched thoughts above 
Earth, or what poor mortals love." 

On a stone at the source of the Dove, and 
again on the Fishing- House which has stood 

133 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

since 1674 " Piscatoribus sacrum," his initials 
are interlaced with those of his friend and 
fellow-fisherman Charles Cotton, the patron 
sinner of the locality. In Beresford Dale 
may be found the little cave where this gay 
and thriftless gentleman, author of the second 
part of "The Complete Angler," used to hide 
from his creditors. At Wootton Hall Jean 
Jacques Rousseau once resided for over a 
year, writing on his " Confessions " and amus- 
ing himself scattering through Dovedale the 
seeds of many of the mountain plants of 
France. In a cottage at Church Mayfield, 
Moore wrote his "Lalla Rookh," and near 
Colwich Abbey once stood the house in which 
Handel composed much of the "Messiah." 

We did not see any of these spots. The 
automobile would none of them. It whisked 
about giddily half an hour, ramping into 
the wrong shrines and out again, discon- 
certing a herd of deer and a pack of young 
fox-hounds, and then impetuously bolted 
back to Uttoxeter. There were antiquities 
all along the way, — British barrows, Roman 
camps, mediaeval churches, Elizabethan man- 
sions, — but the dusty and odoriferous trail of 
our car was flung impartially over them all. 

134 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

We shot through Uttoxeter and went whir- 
ring on. A glimpse of the hillside ruins of 
Chartley Castle brought a fleeting sorrow for 
Mary Queen of Scots. It was one of those 
many prisons that she knew in the bitter years 
between Cockermouth and Fotheringay, — 
the years that whitened her bright hair and 
twisted her with cruel rheumatism. She was 
harried from Carlisle in Cumberland to 
Bolton Castle in Yorkshire, and thence sent 
to Tutbury, on the Derby side of the Dove, 
in custody of the unlucky Earl of Shrewsbury 
and his keen-eyed, shrewish- tongued dame, 
Bess of Hardwick. But still the poor queen 
was shifted from one stronghold to another. 
Yorkshire meted out to her Elizabeth's harsh 
hospitality at Sheffield, Warwickshire at 
Coventry, Leicestershire at Ashby-de-la- 
Zouch, Derbyshire at Wingfield Manor and 
Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall, even at 
Buxton, where she was occasionally allowed 
to go for the baths, and Staffordshire at Tixall 
and here at Chartley. It was while she was 
at Chartley, with Sir Amyas Paulet for her 
jailer, that the famous Babington conspiracy 
was hatched, and anything but an automo- 
bile would have stopped and searched for that 

135 



A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 

stone wall in which a brewer's boy deposited 
the incriminating letters, read and copied 
every one by Walsingham before they reached 
the captive. 

At Weston we jumped the Trent again 
and pounded on to Stafford, the shoemakers' 
town, where we came near knocking two 
bicyclists into a ditch. They were plain- 
spoken young men, and, addressing them- 
selves to the chauffeur, they expressed an 
unfavourable opinion of his character. Staf- 
ford lies half-way between the two coal-fields 
of the county. Directly south some fifteen 
miles is Wolverhampton, the capital of the 
iron- manufacturing district. We remem- 
bered that Stafford was the birthplace of 
Isaak Walton, but it was too late to gain 
access to the old Church of St. Mary's, 
which has his bust in marble and, to boot, 
the strangest font in England. We climbed 
the toilsome heights of Stafford Castle for the 
view it was too dark to see, and then once 
more delivered ourselves over to the champ- 
ing monster, which spun us back to Shrews- 
bury through a weird, infernal world flaring 
with tongues of fire. 



136 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND- 
WARWICKSHIRE 

A FEW miles to the northwest of Coven- 
try lies the village of Meriden, which is 
called the centre of England. There 
on a tableland is a little pool from which the 
water flows both west and east, on the one 
side reaching the Severn and the British Chan- 
nel, on the other the Trent and the North Sea. 
"Leafy Warwickshire" is watered, as all the 
world knows, by the Avon. The county, 
though its borders show here and there a hilly 
fringe, and though the spurs of the Cotswolds 
invade it on the south, is in the main a fertile 
river- basin, given over to agriculture and to 
pasturage. The forest of Arden, that once 
covered the Midlands, is still suggested by 
rich- timbered parks and giant trees of an- 
cient memory. On the north, Warwickshire 
tapers up into the Staffordshire coal-fields 
and puts on a manufacturing character. The 
great town of this district is Birmingham, 
capital of the hardware industries. 

137 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

It was from Birmingham that we started 
out on our Warwickshire trip. We had but 
a hasty impression of a well-built, prosperous, 
purposeful town, but if we had known at the 
time what masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood were to be seen in the Art Gal- 
lery we would have taken a later train than 
we did for Nuneaton. Here we bade farewell 
to railways, having decided to "post" through 
the county. Our automobile scamper across 
Staffordshire had left us with a conviction that 
this mode of travel was neither democratic 
nor becoming, — least of all adapted to a 
literary pilgrimage. We preferred to drive 
ourselves, but the English hostlers, shaking 
their stolid heads, preferred that we should 
be driven. It was only by a lucky chance 
that we had found, in the Lake Country, a 
broad-minded butcher who would trust us on 
short expeditions with "Toby" and a pony- 
cart. After all, it is easier to adapt yourself 
to foreign ways than to adapt them to you, 
and the old, traditional, respectable method 
of travel in England is by post. The regular 
rate for a victoria — which carries light lug- 
gage — and a single horse is a shilling a mile, 
with no charge for return, but with a consider- 

138 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

able tip to the driver. In out-of-the-way 
places the rate was sometimes only ninepence 
a mile, but in the regions most affected by 
tourists it might run up to eighteenpence. So 
at Nuneaton we took a carriage for Coventry, 
a distance, with the digressions we proposed, 
of about twelve miles, and set out, on a fair 
August afternoon, to explore the George 
Eliot country. 

Our driver looked blank at the mention of 
George Eliot, but brightened at the name of 
Mary Anne Evans. He could not locate for 
us, however, the school which she had at- 
tended in Nuneaton, but assured us that "Mr. 
Jones 'ud know." To consult this oracle we 
drove through a prosaic little town, dodging 
the flocks of sheep that were coming in 
for the fair, to a stationer's shop. Mr. 
Jones, the photographer of the neighbour- 
hood, proved to be as well versed in George 
Eliot literature and George Eliot localities 
as he was generous in imparting his knowl- 
edge. He mapped out our course with all 
the concern and kindliness of a host, and 
practically conferred upon us the freedom of 
the city. 

Nuneaton was as placidly engaged in mak- 
139 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

ing hats and ribbons as if the foot of genius 
had never hallowed its soil, and went its ways, 
regardless while we peered out at inns and 
residences mirrored in George Eliot's writ- 
ings. The school to which Robert Evans' 
"little lass" used to ride in on donkeyback 
every morning, as the farmers' daughters ride 
still, is The Elms on Vicarage Street, — a 
plain bit of a place, with its bare walls and 
hard forms, to have been the scene of the 
awakening of that keen intelligence. We 
were duly shown the cloak- closet, to reach 
whose hooks a girl of eight or nine must have 
had to stand on tiptoe, the small classrooms, 
and the backyard that served as a playground. 
The educational equipment was of the sim- 
plest, — but what of that ? Hamlet could 
have been "bounded in a nutshell," and here 
there was space enough for thought. A Nun- 
eaton lady, lodging with the caretaker dur- 
ing the vacation, told us with a touch of quiet 
pride that her husband had known "Marian 
Evans" well in their young days, and had 
often walked home with her of an evening 
from the rectory. 

As we drove away toward that rectory in 
Chilvers Coton, the parish adjoining Nunea- 

140 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

ton on the south, we could almost see the 
little schoolgirl riding homeward on her 
donkey. It is Maggie Tulliver, of " The Mill 
on the Floss," who reveals the nature of that 
tragic child, "a creature full of eager and 
passionate longing for all that was beau- 
tiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; 
with an ear straining after dreamy music that 
died away, and would not come near to her; 
with a blind, unconscious yearning for some- 
thing that would link together the wonderful 
impressions of this mysterious life, and give 
her soul a sense of home in it." 

Chilvers Coton, like Nuneaton, has no 
memories of its famous woman of letters. 
The only time we saw her name that after- 
noon was as we drove, two hours later, through 
a grimy colliery town where a row of posters 
flaunted the legend: 

ASK FOR GEORGE ELIOT SAUCE. 

But in the Chilvers Coton church, familiar 
to readers of " Scenes from Clerical Life," is 
a window given by Mr. Isaac Evans in 
memory of his wife, not of his sister, with an 
inscription so like Tom Tulliver's way of 

141 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

admonishing Maggie over the shoulder that 
we came near resenting it: 

/ "She layeth her hands to the spindle." 

But we would not flout the domestic virtues, 
and still less would we begrudge Tom's wife 
— not without her share of shadow, for no 
people are so hard to live with as those who 
are always right — her tribute of love and 
honour. So with closed lips we followed the 
sexton out into the churchyard, past the much 
visited grave of "Milly Barton," past the 
large recumbent monument that covers the 
honest ashes of Robert Evans of Griff, and 
past so many fresh mounds that we exclaimed 
in dismay. Our guide, however, viewed them 
with a certain decorous satisfaction, and inti- 
mated that for this branch of his craft times 
were good in Chilvers Coton, for an epidemic 
was rioting among the children. "I've had 
twelve graves this month already," he said, 
"and there" — pointing to where a spade 
stood upright in a heap of earth — "I've got 
another to-day." We demurred about de- 
taining him, with such pressure of business 
on his hands, but he had already led us, over 
briars and sunken slabs, to a stone inscribed 

142 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

with the name of Isaac Pearson Evans of 
Griff and with the text: 

"The memory of the just is blessed." 

As we stood there, with our attendant ghoul 
telling us, in rambling, gossipy fashion, what 
a respectable man Mr. Isaac Evans was, and 
how he never would have anything to do with 
"his sister for years, but after she married 
Mr. Cross he took her up again and went to 
her funeral," — how could we force out of 
mind a passage that furnishes such strange 
commentary on that graven line ? 

"Tom, indeed, was of opinion that Maggie was a 
silly little thing. All girls were silly. . . . Still he was 
very fond of his sister, and meant always to take care 
of her, make her his housekeeper, and punish her when 
she did wrong. . . . Tom, you perceive, was rather a 
Rhadamanthine personage, having more than the usual 
share of boy's justice in him — the justice that desires 
to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be hurt, and 
is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact amount 
of their deserts." 

It is in this parish of Chilvers Coton that 
George Eliot was born, in a quiet brown 
house set among laden apple-trees, as we saw 
it, with a bright, old-fashioned garden of 

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THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

dahlias, sweet peas, and hollyhocks. The 
place is known as South Farm or Arbury 
Farm, for it is on the grounds of Arbury 
Priory, one of the smaller monasteries that 
fell prey to Henry VIII, now held by the New- 
digate family. We drove to it through a 
park of noble timber, where graceful deer 
were nibbling the aristocratic turf or making 
inquisitive researches among the rabbit war- 
rens. Robert Evans, of Welsh origin, was 
a Staffordshire man. A house-builder's son, 
he had himself begun life as a carpenter. 
Adam Bede was made in his likeness. Ris- 
ing to the position of forester and then to that 
of land agent, he was living, at the time of his 
daughter's birth, at Arbury Farm, in charge 
of the Newdigate estate. Three or four 
months later he removed to Griff, an old 
brick farmhouse standing at a little distance 
from the park, on the highroad. Griff House 
passed, in due course of time, from the occu- 
pancy of Robert Evans to that of his son, and 
on the latter's death, a few years ago, was 
converted into a Dairy School "for gentle- 
man-farmers' daughters." Pleasant and be- 
nignant was its look that August afternoon, 
as it stood well back among its beautiful 

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growth of trees, — cut-leaf birch and yellow- 
ing chestnut, Cedar of Lebanon, pine, locust, 
holly, oak, and yew, with a pear-tree pleached 
against the front wall on one side, while the 
other was thickly overgrown with ivy. Gera- 
niums glowed about the door, and the mellow 
English sunshine lay softly over all. This 
was a sweet and tender setting for the figure 
of that ardent wonder-child, — a figure im- 
agination could not disassociate from that of 
the sturdy elder brother, whose presence — 
if he were in affable and condescending mood 
— made her paradise. 

"They trotted along and sat down together, with no 
thought that life would ever change much for them. 
They would only get bigger and not go to school, and 
it would always be like the holidays ; they would always 
live together and be fond of each other. . . . Life did 
change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not 
wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of those 
first years would always make part of their lives. We 
could never have loved this earth so well if we had had 
no childhood in it." 

We forgave, as we lingered in that gracious 

scene, "the memory of the just." For all 

Tom's virtues, he had given Maggie, though 

she was her father's darling and had no lack 

10 145 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

of indulgent love about her, the best happi- 
ness of her childhood. Across the years of 
misunderstanding and separation she could 
write: 

"But were another childhood's world my share* 
I would be born a little sister there." 

We had even a disloyal impulse of sym- 
pathy for these kinsfolk of genius, who must 
needs pay the price by having their inner 
natures laid bare before the world, but we 
checked it. Our worlds, little or large, are 
bound to say and believe something concern- 
ing us: let us be content in proportion as it 
approximates the truth. 

Our road to Coventry ran through a min- 
ing district. Every now and then we met 
groups of black-faced colliers. Robert Evans 
must often have driven his daughter along 
this way, for in her early teens she was at 
school in the City of the Three Spires, and 
later on, when her widowed father resigned 
to his son his duties as land agent, and Griff 
House with them, she removed there with him 
to make him a new home. The house is still 
to be seen in Foleshill road, on the approach 
from the north; but here the star of George 

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THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

Eliot pales before a greater glory, the all- 
eclipsing splendour, for at Coventry we are 
on the borders of the Shakespeare country. 

Stratford- on- Avon lies only twenty miles 
to the south, and what were twenty miles to 
the creator of Ariel and Puck? Surely his 
young curiosity must have brought him early 
to this 

"Quaint old town of toil and trouble, 
Quaint old town of art and song." 

The noble symmetries of St. Michael's, its 
companion spires of Holy Trinity and Grey 
Friars, the narrow streets and over-jutting 
housetops, the timber-framed buildings, the 
frescoed walls and carven window-heads, all 
that we see to-day of the mediaeval fashion he 
must have seen in fresher beauty, and far 
more; yet even then the glory of Coventry 
had departed. From the eleventh century, 
when Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and his Coun- 
tess of beloved memory, the Lady Godiva, 
built their magnificent abbey, of which hardly 
a trace remains, the city had been noted for its 
religious edifices. Its triple-spired cathedral 
of St. Mary, — existing to-day in but a few 
foundation fragments, — its monasteries and 

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THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

nunneries and churches of the various orders 
formed an architectural group unmatched 
in England. Coventry was conspicuous, too, 
for civic virtues. As its merchants increased 
in riches, they lavished them freely on their 
queenly town. The Earl in his now crumbled 
castle and the Lord Abbot had hitherto di- 
vided the rule, but in 1345 came the first 
Mayor. It was while the Rose- red Richard 
sat so gaily on his rocking throne that Cov- 
entry celebrated the completion of its massive 
walls, three miles in circuit, with twelve gates 
and thirty- two towers. In the middle of the 
fifteenth century it received a special charter, 
and Henry VI declared it "the best governed 
city in all his realm." It was then that the 
famous guilds of Coventry were at their 
height, for its merchants had waxed wealthy 
in the wool trade, and its artisans were cun- 
ning at cloth- making. 

As we stood in St. Mary's Hall, erected 
toward the end of the fourteenth century by 
the united fraternities known as the Holy 
Trinity Guild, we realised something of the 
devotional spirit and artistic joy of those old 
craftsmen. The oak roof of the Great Hall 
is exquisitely figured with a choir of angels 

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THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

playing on their divers instruments. In the 
kitchen — such a kitchen, with stone arches 
and fine old timber- work ! — another angel 
peeps down to see that the service of spit and 
gridiron is decorously done. The building 
throughout abounds in carved panels, groined 
roofs, state chairs of elaborate design, heraldic 
insignia, portraits, grotesques, and displays 
a marvellous tapestry, peopled with a softly 
fading company of saints and bishops, kings 
and queens. 

Among the Coventry artists, that glad- 
some throng of architects, painters, weavers, 
goldsmiths, and silversmiths who wrought so 
well for the adornment of their city, John 
Thornton is best remembered. It was he 
who made — so they say at Coventry — the 
east window of York minster, and here in St. 
Mary's Hall he placed superb stained glass 
of harmoniously blended browns. We could 
fancy a Stratford boy with hazel eyes intent 
upon it, conning the faces of those English 
kings to whom he was to give new life and 
longer reigns. Henry VI holds the centre, 
thus revealing the date of the window, and 
near him are Henry IV and Henry V, Lan- 
castrian usurpers to whose side the partial 

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dramatist has lured us all. It was to join 
their forces at Shrewsbury that he sent Fal- 
staff marching through Coventry with his 
ragged regiment, whose every soldier looked 
like "Lazarus in the painted cloth." Richard 
II is conspicuous by his absence, but in writ- 
ing his tragedy the young Shakespeare re- 
membered that Coventry was the scene of 
the attempted trial at arms between Boling- 
broke and the Duke of Norfolk. The secret 
cause of the combat involved the honour of 
Richard, and he, not daring to trust the issue, 
threw "his warder down," forbade the duel, 
and sentenced both champions to 

"tread the stranger paths of banishment." 

But Shakespeare's Coventry, like Shake- 
speare's London, was largely a city of ruins. 
Broken towers and desolate courts told of 
the ruthless sweep of the Reformation. The 
cloth trade, too, was falling off, and even that 
blue thread whose steadfast dye gave rise to 
the proverb "True as Coventry blue" was 
less in demand under Elizabeth than under 
Henry VIII. Yet though so much of its 
noble ecclesiastical architecture was defaced 
or overthrown, though its tide of fortune had 

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THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

turned, the city was lovely still, among its 
most charming buildings being various charit- 
able institutions founded and endowed by 
wealthy citizens. That exquisite tmiber-and- 
plaster almshouse for aged women, Ford's 
Hospital, then almost new, may have gained 
in mellow tints with time, but its rich wood- 
work, one fretted story projecting over an- 
other like the frilled heads of antiquated 
dames, row above row, peering out to see 
what might be passing in the street beneath, 
must have delighted the vision then as it de- 
lights it still. I dare say Will Shakespeare, 
saucy lad that he was, doffed his cap and 
flashed a smile as reviving as a beam of sun- 
shine at some wistful old body behind the 
diamond panes of her long and narrow win- 
dow. For there she would have been sitting, 
as her successor is sitting yet, trying to be 
thankful for her four shillings a week, her fuel, 
her washing, and her doctoring, but ever, in 
her snug corner, dusting and rearranging the 
bits of things, — cups and spoons, a cushion 
or two, Scripture texts, — her scanty salvage 
from the wreck of home. That the pathos 
of the old faces enhances the picturesque- 
ness of it all, those eyes so keen to read the 

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THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

book of human life would not have failed to 
note. 

Coventry would have had for the seeking 
heart of a poet other attractions than those of 
architectural beauty. It was a storied city, 
with its treasured legend of Lady Godiva's 
ride — a legend not then vulgarised by 
the Restoration addition of Peeping Tom — 
and with its claim to be the birthplace of 
England's patron saint, the redoubtable 
dragon slayer. A fourteenth- century poet 
even asserts of St. George and his bride 
that they 

"many years of joy did see; 
They lived and died in Coventree." 

It had a dim memory of some old-time 
slaughter — perhaps of Danes — commemo- 
rated in its play of Hock Tuesday. Coventry 
was, indeed, a "veray revelour" in plays and 
pageants, and if nothing else could have 
brought a long-limbed, wide-awake youth to 
try what his Rosalind and Celia and Orlando 
found so easy, a holiday escapade in the 
Forest of Arden, we may be all but sure the 
Corpus Christi Mysteries would have given 
the fiend the best of the argument with con- 

152 



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science. It is not likely, however, that it had 
to be a runaway adventure. That worship- 
ful alderman, John Shakespeare, was himself 
of a restless disposition and passing fond of 
plays. He would have made little, in the 
years of his prosperity, of a summer-day 
canter to Coventry, with his small son of 
glowing countenance mounted on the same 
stout nag. Later on, when debts and law- 
suits were weighing down his spirits, the 
father may have turned peevish and withheld 
both his company and his horse, but by that 
time young Will, grown tall and sturdy, could 
have trudged it, putting his enchanting tongue 
to use, when his legs, like Touchstone's, were 
weary, in winning a lift from some farmer's 
wain for a mile or so along the road. But by 
hook or by crook he would be there, laughing 
in his doublet- sleeve at the blunders of the 
"rude mechanicals" — of the tailors who 
were playing the Nativity and of the weavers 
on whose pageant platform was set forth 
the Presentation in the Temple. Robin 
Starveling the Tailor, and his donkeyship 
Nick Bottom the Weaver, were they not 
natives of Coventry? And when the truant 
— if truant he was — came footsore back to 

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THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

Stratford and acted over again in the Henley 
Street garden, sweet with June, the "swag- 
gering" of the "hempen home-spuns," did 
not his gentle mother hide her smiles by 
stooping to tend her roses, while the father's 
lungs, despite himself, began to "crow like 
Chanticleer" ? 

Foolish city, to have kept no record of those 
visits of the yeoman's son, that dusty young- 
ster with the dancing eyes ! When royal per- 
sonages came riding through your gates, you 
welcomed them with stately ceremonies and 
splendid gifts, with gay street pageants and 
gold cups full of coin. Your quills ran verse 
as lavishly as your pipes ran wine. You had 
ever a loyal welcome for poor Henry VI ; and 
for his fiery queen, Margaret of Anjou, you 
must needs present, in 1456, St. Margaret 
slaying the dragon. Four years later, though 
with secret rage, you were tendering an ova- 
tion to her arch enemy and conqueror, Ed- 
ward IV. Here this merry monarch kept his 
Christmas in 1465, and nine years later came 
again to help you celebrate the feast of St. 
George. For Prince Edward, three years 
old, your Mayor and Council, all robed in 
blue and green, turned out in 1474, while 

154 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

players strutted before the child's wondering 
eyes, while the music of harp and viol filled 
his ears, and the "Children of Issarell" flung 
flowers before his little feet. His murderer, 
Richard III, you received with no less elabo- 
rate festivities nine years later, when he came 
to see your Corpus Christi plays. But it was 
to you that his supplanter, Henry VII, re- 
paired straight from the victory of Bosworth 
Field, and you, never Yorkist at heart, flew 
your banners with enthusiastic joy. His 
heir, Arthur, a winsome and delicate prince, 
you greeted with unconscious irony, four 
years before his death, by the blessings of the 
Queen of Fortune. You summoned the 
"Nine Orders of Angels," with a throng of 
"divers beautiful damsels," to welcome Henry 
VIII and the ill-omened Catherine of Aragon 
in 1510. They were sumptuously entertained 
at your glorious Priory, for whose destruction 
that graceless guest, the King, was presently 
to seal command. But before its day of 
doom it sheltered one more royal visitor of 
yours, the Princess Mary, who came in 1525 
to see the Mercers' Pageant. In 1565, the 
year after Shakespeare's birth, you feted with 
all splendour Queen Elizabeth, the last of the 

155 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

Tudors, and in 161G, the year of Shakespeare's 
death, you spread the feast for King James, 
the first of the Stuarts. But you have for- 
gotten your chief guest of all, the roguish 
youngster munching his bread and cheese in 
the front rank of the rabble, the heaven- 
crowned poet who was to be more truly king- 
maker than the great Warwick himself. 

Our first seeing of the name of Warwick in 
Warwickshire was over a green-grocer's shop 
in Coventry. The green-grocer was all very 
well, but the sewing-machine factories and, 
worse yet, the flourishing business in bicycles 
and motor-cars jarred on our sixteenth-cen- 
tury dream. I am ashamed to confess how 
speedily we accomplished our Coventry sight- 
seeing, and how early, on the day following our 
arrival, we took the road again. We set out 
in our sedate victoria with high expectations, 
for we had been told over and over that the 
route from Coventry to Warwick was "the 
most beautiful drive in England." For most 
of the distance we found it a long, straight, 
level avenue, bordered by large trees. There 
were few outlooks; clouds of dust hung in 
the air, and gasoline odours trailed along the 
way. We counted it, as a drive, almost the 

156 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

dullest of our forty odd, but it was good road- 
ing, and the opinion of the horse may have 
been more favourable. 

Five miles brought us to Kenilworth, about 
whose stately ruins were wandering the usual 
summer groups of trippers and tourists. Its 
ivies were at their greenest and its hollies 
glistened with an emerald sheen, but when I 
had last seen the castle, in a far-away October, 
those hollies were yet more beautiful with gold- 
edged leaves and with ruby berries. Then, 
as now, the lofty red walls seemed to me to 
wear an aspect, if not of austerity, at least of 
courtly reserve, as if, whoever might pry and 
gossip, their secrets were still their own. In 
point of fact, the bewitchments of Sir Walter 
Scott have made it well-nigh impossible for 
any of us to bear in mind that in the ancient 
fortress of Kenilworth King John was wont 
to lurk, spinning out his spider-webs, that 
Simon de Montfort once exercised gay lord- 
ship here, and here, in sterner times, held 
Henry III and Prince Edward prisoners; 
that these towers witnessed the humiliation 
of the woful Edward II, and that in these 
proud halls the mirth- loving Queen Bess had 
been entertained by the Earl of Leicester on 

157 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

three several occasions prior to the famous 
visit of 1575. On her first coming our poet 
was a prattler of two — if only Mistress 
Shakespeare had kept a "Baby Record"! — 
and I am willing to admit that the event may 
not have interested him. When her second 
royal progress excited Warwickshire, he was 
a four- year- old, teasing his mother for fairy 
stories, and peeping into the acorn-cups for 
hidden elves, but hardly likely to have been 
chosen to play the part of Cupid while 

"the imperial votaress passed on, 
In maiden meditation, fancy-free." 

As a boy of eight, however, a "gallant child, 
one that makes old hearts fresh," he may have 
stood by the roadside, or been perched on 
some friendly shoulder to add his shrill note 
to the loyal shout when the Queen rode by 
amid her retinue; and three years later, I 
warrant his quick wits found a way to see 
something of those glittering shows, those 
"princely pleasures of Kenil worth Castle," 
which lasted nineteen days and were the talk 
of the county. How eagerly his winged im- 
agination would have responded to the Lady 
of the Lake, to Silvanus, Pomona and Ceres, 

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THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

to the "savage man" and the satyrs, to the 
"triton riding on a mermaid 18 foot long; 
as also Arion on a dolphin, with rare music " ! * 
If we did not think so much about Amy Rob- 
sart at Kenilworth as, according to Scott, we 
should have done, it is because we were un- 
fortunate enough to know that she perished 
fifteen years before these high festivities, — 
three years, indeed, before the Castle was 
granted to Robert Dudley. 

Stoneleigh Abbey, with its tempting por- 
traits, lay three miles to the left, and we would 
not swerve from our straight road, which, 
however, grew more exciting as we neared 
Warwick, for it took us past Blacklow Hill, 
to whose summit, six hundred years ago, the 
fierce barons of Edward II dragged his French 
favourite, Piers Gaveston, and struck off that 
jaunty head, which went bounding down the 
hill to be picked up at the bottom by a friar, 
who piously bore it in his hood to Oxford. 

We halted again at Guy's Cliff, constrained 



1 From the account given by Sir William Dugdale, the cele- 
brated antiquary, who was born at Shustoke, eight miles west of 
Nuneaton, in 1605, and educated at Coventry. " The Antiqmties 
of Warwickshire " he published in 1656. He died in 1686, and 
his tomb, with his own inscription, may be seen in the chancel of 
Shustoke Church. 

159 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

by its ancient tradition of Guy, Earl of War- 
wick, he who 

"did quell that wondrous cow" 

of Dunsmore Heath. My own private re- 
spect for horned beasts kept me from flip- 
pantly undervaluing this exploit. After other 
doughty deeds, giants, monsters, and Saracens 
falling like ninepins before him, Guy returned 
in the odour of sanctity from the Holy Land, 
but instead of going home to Warwick, where 
his fair countess was pining, he sought out 
this cliff rising from the Avon and, in a con- 
venient cavity, established himself as a hermit. 
Every day he begged bread at the gate of his 
own castle, and his wife, not recognising her 
dread lord in this meek anchorite, supplied 
his needs. Just before his end he sent her a 
ring, and she, thus discovering the identity of 
the beggar, sped to the cave, arriving just in 
time to see him die. Other hermits succeeded 
to his den, and in the reign of Henry VI, 
Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, 
founded a chantry there. Henry VIII made 
short work of that, and the romantic rocks 
passed from one owner to another, the present 
mansion having been built above them in the 

160 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

eighteenth century. Guy's Cliff was termed 
by Leland "a place delightful to the muses," 
and we were pleased to find it still enjoyed 
their favour. One of those supernaturally 
dignified old servitors who hang about to 
catch the pennies struck an attitude on the 
bridge and, informing us that he was a poet 
and had had verses in print, recited with 
touching earnestness the following effusion : 

"'Ere yer can sit and rest a while, 
And watch the wild ducks dive in play, 

Listen to the cooin' dove 
And the noisy jay, 
Watch the moorhen as she builds her rushy nest 
Swayin' hupon the himmortal Havon's 'eavin' breast." 

Warwick, a wide-streeted, stately old town, 
with two of its mediaeval gates still standing, 
was familiar to us both. I had spent a week 
here, some years ago, and taken occasion, 
after inspecting the lions, to view the horses, 
for the autumn races chanced to be on. I 
remember sitting, surprised at myself, on the 
grand stand, in an atmosphere of tobacco 
smoke and betting. The bookmakers stood 
below, conspicuous in green velveteen coats ; 
some had their names on the open money- 
bags hanging from their necks; all were 
11 1G1 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

shouting themselves hoarse. A red -nosed 
lady in dashing apparel sat on my right, en- 
lightening my ignorance with a flood of jockey 
English, while on my left a plain-faced, anx- 
ious little body would turn from helping her 
husband decide his bets to urge upon me the 
superior morality of this to all other forms of 
English sport. The green below was filled 
with a bustling crowd of men, women, and 
children, pressing about the booths, the 
Punch- and- Judys and the show- carts, ad- 
venturing upon the swings and merry-go- 
rounds, tossing balls at gay whirligigs and 
winning cocoanuts in the fascinating game 
of "Aunt Sally," or ransacking the "silken 
treasury," 

"Lawns as white as driven snow, 
Cyprus black as e'er was crow," 

of many a modern Autolycus. The throng 
was bright with fluttering pennons, red soldier 
coats, and the vivid finery of housemaids on 
a holiday. I saw five out of the seven races 
sweep by and waxed enthusiastic over "Por- 
ridge" and "Odd Mixture," but "good old 
Maggie Cooper," on which my red-nosed 
neighbour lost heavily, while the husband of 

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THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

my moral little friend won, put me to such 
embarrassment between them that I be- 
thought myself of my principles and slipped 
away. 

Eschewing such profane reminiscences, I 
recalled the Church of St. Mary, with its 
haughty Beauchamp Chapel where ancient 
Earls of Warwick keep their marble state, to- 
gether with the Earl of Leicester and his 
"noble impe." I recalled the delectable home 
for old soldiers, Leycester's Hospital, so in- 
imitably described by Hawthorne. Across 
the years I still could see the antique quad- 
rangle with its emblazoned scutcheons and 
ornately lettered texts ; the vaulted hall with 
its great carven beams ; the delightful kitchen 
with its crested fireplace of huge dimensions, 
its oaken settles and copper flagons, its Saxon 
chair that has rested weary mortality for a 
thousand years, and its silken fragment of 
Amy Robsart's needlework. Most clearly 
of all rose from memory the figures of the old 
pensioners, the "brethren" garbed in long 
blue gowns with silver badge on shoulder, 
stamped, as the whole building is stamped 
over and over, with the cognisance of The 
Bear and the Ragged Staff. I had done 

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THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

homage at Warwick to the memory of Landor, 
who was born there in a house dear to his 
childhood for its mulberries and cedars, its 
chestnut wood, and its fig tree at the window. 
Partly for his sake I had visited Rugby, on 
the eastern border of Warwickshire, — that 
great public school which became, under Dr. 
Arnold's mastership, such a power in Eng- 
lish life. Rugby disapproved of my special 
interest, for it has had better boys than 
Landor, so wild- tempered a lad that his 
father was requested to remove him when, 
only fifteen, he was within five of being head 
of the school. But the neighbouring village 
of Bilton entirely endorsed my motives when 
I went the rounds of Bilton Hall as an act of 
respectful sympathy for the eminent Mr. 
Addison, who wedded the Dowager Countess 
of Warwick and here resided with her for the 
three years that his life endured under that 
magnificent yoke. 

With so much sightseeing to our credit, we 
decided to limit our Warwick experiences on 
this occasion to luncheon and the castle, for 
although we both had "done" the splendid 
home of the Earls of Warwick more than once, 
even viewing it by moonlight and by dawn- 

164 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

light from the bridge across the Avon, it did 
not seem decorous to pass by without leaving 
cards — not our visiting cards, but those for 
which one pays two shillings apiece in the 
shop over against the gate. 

Warwick Castle, built of the very centu- 
ries, cannot be expected to alter with Time's 
"brief hours and weeks" — at least, with so 
few of them as fall to one poor mortal's lot. 
From visit to visit I find it as unchanged as 
the multiplication table. By that same chill 
avenue, cut through the solid rock and densely 
shaded, we passed into the same grassy court 
lorded over by the same arrogant peacocks — 
who have, however, developed an intemperate 
appetite for sweet chocolate — and girt about 
by the same proud walls and grey, embattled 
towers. A princely seat of splendid memo- 
ries, one is half ashamed to join the inquisi- 
tive procession that trails after a supercilious 
guide through the series of state apartments 
— Great Hall, Red Drawing Room, Cedar 
Room, Gilt Drawing Room, Boudoir, Armory 
Passage, and so on to the end. We looked at 
the same relics, — old Guy's dubious porridge 
pot, Marie Antoinette's mosaic table, Queen 
Anne's red velvet bed, the mace of the King- 

165 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

maker, Cromwell's helmet; the same treas- 
ures of rare workmanship and fabulous cost, 
— a Venetian table inlaid with precious stones, 
shimmering tapestries, enamelled cabinets and 
clocks; the same notable succession of por- 
traits in which the varying art of Van Dyke, 
Holbein, Rembrandt, Rubens, Lely, Kneller 
has perpetuated some of the most significant 
faces of history. How strangely they turn 
their eyes on one another ! — Anne Boleyn ; 
her Bluebeard, Henry VIII, pictured here not 
only in his rank manhood, but as a sweet- 
lipped child ; Loyola in priestly vestments of 
gold and crimson ; the Earl of Strafford with 
his doomful look; Charles I; Henrietta 
Maria; Rupert of the Rhine; the heroic 
Marquis of Montrose; the literary Duke of 
Newcastle ; the romantic Gondomar, Spanish 
ambassador to Elizabeth ; and with them — 
confuting my rash statement that the castle 
knows no change — Sargent's portrait of the 
present Countess of Warwick, a democrat of 
the democrats, enfolding her little son. There 
remained the walk through the gardens to the 
conservatory, whose Warwick Vase, said to 
have been found in Hadrian's Villa, is, for all 
its grandeur, less dear to memory than the 

166 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

level green branches of the great cedars of 
Lebanon. But when it came to peacocks 
and pussycats cut in yew, we deemed it time 
to resume our journey. 

Leamington was close at hand, with its 
Royal Pump Rooms, swimming-baths and 
gardens, its villas and crescents and bath- 
chairs and parades, its roll of illustrious in- 
valids who have drunk of its mineral waters ; 
but we would not turn aside for Leamington. 
Dr. Parr's church at Hatton could not detain 
us, nor other churches and mansions of re- 
nown, nor the footsteps of the worthies of the 
Gunpowder Plot, nor Edge Hill where Charles 
I met the Parliamentarians in the first battle 
of the Civil War, nor the park of Redway 
Grange in which Fielding wrote — and 
laughed as he wrote — a portion of ' ' Tom 
Jones," nor the Red Horse cut in turf, nor 
any other of the many attractions of a 
neighbourhood so crowded with memorials 
of stirring life. Our thoughts were all of 
Shakespeare now; our goal was Stratford- 
on-Avon. 

Should we drive by the right bank of the 
river, or the left? The choice lay between 
Snitterfield and Charlecote Park. In Snitter- 

167 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

field, a village four miles to the north of Strat- 
ford, the poet's paternal grandsire, Richard 
Shakespeare, wore out a quiet yeoman life, til- 
ling the farm that he rented from Robert Ar- 
den of Wilmcote, father of the poet's mother. 
There must have been a strain of something 
better than audacity in the tenant's son to win 
him the hand of Mary Arden. Henry Shake- 
speare, the poet's uncle, died at Snitterfield in 
1596, when the quick scion of that slow blood 
was in the first fever of his London successes. 
But we chose the left-hand road and Charle- 
cote Park. For a while the sunny Avon, 
silver- flecked with such swans as Shakespeare 
and Ben Jonson may have smiled upon 
together, bore us blithe company; then We 
passed under the shadow of oaks with 
"antique root" out-peeping, and of more 

"moss'd trees 
That have outliv'd the eagle." 

Before the Forest of Arden was cut away 
for the use of the Droitwich salt- boilers and 
other Vandals, the land was so thickly wooded 
that tradition says a squirrel might have 
skipped from bough to bough across the 
county, without once touching the ground. 

168 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

Now it is rich glebe and tillage. We skirted 
the broad acres of Charlecote Park and 
viewed its "native burghers," the deer, but 
were loth to believe that Shakespeare, even 
in his heyday of youthful riot, would have 
"let the law go whistle" for the sake of "a 
hot venison- pasty to dinner." Yet it is like 
enough that there was no love lost between 
the Shakespeares and the Lucys, a family who 
have held the manor since the twelfth century 
and, in their Elizabethan representative, laid 
themselves open to the suspicion of pompous 
bearing and deficient sense of humour. The 
luces, or pikes, in their coat of arms, the pun- 
loving tongue of a "most acute juvenal" 
could hardly have resisted. "The dozen 
white louses do become an old coat well." 
Sir Thomas Lucy entertained Queen Eliza- 
beth in 1572, and if the boys from Stratford 
Grammar School were not in evidence at the 
Park Gates on her arrival, it must have been 
because Holofernes was drilling them for a 
show of the Nine Worthies later on. 

In the fields about the town the pea- pickers, 
an autumn feature of this neighbourhood, 
were already at work. They held our eyes 
for a little and, when we looked forward again, 

169 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

there by the river rose the spire of Holy 
Trinity, keeping its faithful watch and ward. 
We clattered over the old stone bridge of four- 
teen arches and there we were, between the 
staring rows of tourist shops, all dealing in 
Shakespeare commercialised. His likeness, 
his name, his plays are pressed into every 
huckster's service. The windows fairly 
bristle with busts of Shakespeare of all sizes 
and half a dozen colours ; with models of the 
Henley Street house, ranging in price, with 
varying magnitude and material, from pen- 
nies to pounds; with editions of his works, 
from miniature copies to colossal ; with photo- 
graphs, postal-cards, etchings, sketches ; with 
rubbings of his tombstone inscription; with 
birthday books and wall texts, and with all 
sorts of articles, paper-cutters, match-boxes, 
pencil- trays, I dare say bootjacks, stamped 
with verse or phrase of his. This poet- barter 
is only a fraction of Shakespeare's endow- 
ment of his native town. Innkeepers, porters, 
drivers, guides, custodians are maintained 
by him. Sir Thomas Lucy never dreamed 
of such a retinue. Hardly did Warwick the 
King-maker support so great a household. 
He is not only Stratford's pride, but its pros- 

170 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

perity, and the welfare of the descendants of 
Shakespeare's neighbours is not a matter for 
the stranger to deplore. Nevertheless, we 
hunted up lodgings, drank bad tea at one of 
the Shakespeare Tea Rooms, and were out 
of those greedy streets as quickly as possible 
on a stroll across the old ridged fields to 
Shottery. 

On the way we met a sophisticated donkey, 
who, waggling his ears, asked in Bottom's 
name for a gratuity of "good sweet hay"; 
and a bevy of children scampered up, as we 
neared Anne Hathaway's cottage, to thrust 
upon us their wilted sprigs of lavender and 
rosemary. They were merry little merchants, 
however, and giggled understandingly when 
we put them off with "No, thank you, Wil- 
liam," "No, thank you, Anne." We arrived 
a minute after six, and the cottage was closed 
for the night, though a medley of indignant 
pilgrims pounded at the garden gate and took 
unavailing camera shots through the twilight. 
But we were content with our dusky glimpse 
of the timber- and- plaster, vinegrown walls 
and low thatched roof. In former years we 
had trodden that box-bordered path up to an 
open door and had duly inspected fireplace 

171 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

and settle, Bible and bacon-cupboard, and the 
ancient bedstead. What we cared for most 
this time was the walk thither, coming by that 
worn footway toward the setting sun, as 
Shakespeare would have come on his eager 
lover's visits, and the return under a gossamer 
crescent which yet served to suggest the 
"blessed moon" that tipped 

"with silver all these fruit-tree tops" 

for a rash young Romeo who would better 
have been minding his book at home. 

The next morning we spent happily in re- 
visiting the Stratford shrines. Even the 
catch-shilling shops bore witness, in their 
garish way, to the supremacy of that genius 
which brings the ends of the earth to this 
Midland market- town. 

The supposed birthplace is now converted, 
after a chequered career, into a Shakespeare 
Museum, where are treasured more or less 
authentic relics and those first editions which 
are worth their weight in radium. Built of 
the tough Arden oak and of honest plaster, 
it was a respectable residence for the times, 
not unworthy of that versatile and vigorous 
citizen who traded in corn and timber and 

172 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

wool and cattle, rose from the offices of ale- 
taster and constable to be successively Cham- 
berlain, Alderman, and High Bailiff, and 
loomed before the eyes of his little son as the 
greatest man in the world. The house, whose 
clay floors it may have been the children's 
task to keep freshly strewn with rushes, would 
have been furnished with oaken chests and 
settles, stools, trestle-boards, truckle-beds, 
and perhaps a great bedstead with carved 
posts. Robert Arden, a man of property and 
position, had left, among other domestic 
luxuries, eleven "painted cloths" — naive 
representations of religious or classical sub- 
jects, with explanatory texts beneath. His 
daughter may have had some of these works 
of art to adorn the walls of her Stratford home, 
and, like enough, she brought her husband 
a silver salt-cellar and a "fair garnish of 
pewter." Her eldest son, whose plays "teach 
courtesy to kings," was doubtless carefully 
bred, — sent off early to school "with shining 
morning face," and expected to wait on his 
parents at their eleven o'clock breakfast be- 
fore taking his own, though we need feel no 
concern about his going hungry. Trust him 
for knowing, as he passed the trenchers and 

173 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

filled the flagons, how to get many a staying 
nibble behind his father's back. 

We wandered on to the Grammar School, 
still located in the picturesque, half-timbered 
building originally erected, toward the end 
of the thirteenth century, by the Guild of the 
Holy Cross. Here once was hospital as well 
as school, and in the long hall on the ground 
floor, even yet faintly frescoed with the Cruci- 
fixion, the Guild held its meetings and kept 
its feasts. Henry VIII made but half a bite 
of all this, but the boy-king, Edward VI, 
eleven years before Shakespeare's birth, gave 
the ancient edifice back to Stratford. Then 
the long hall was used for the deliberations 
of the Town Council, and sometimes, es- 
pecially when John Shakespeare was in office, 
for the performances of strolling players, — 
three men and a boy, perhaps, travelling in 
their costumes, which, by a little shifting and 
furbishing, might serve for an old-fashioned 
morality or a new-fangled chronicle, or, 
should the schoolmaster's choice prevail, for 
something newly Englished from the classics. 
" Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too 
light." The school, thenceforth known as 
Edward VI Grammar School, was perma- 

174 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

nently established in the top story, where it 
is still in active operation. Here we saw the 
Latin room in which another William than 
Mistress Page's hopeful was taught "to hick 
and to hack," and the Mathematics room 
where he learned enough arithmetic to "buy 
spices for our sheep- shearing." He was only 
fourteen or fifteen, it is believed, when his 
father's business troubles broke off his school- 
ing, but not his education. Everywhere was 
"matter for a hot brain." And he, who, 
since the days when he "plucked geese, 
played truant, and whipped top, . . . knew 
not what 't was to be beaten," would have 
borne up blithely against this seeming set- 
back. Nature had given him "wit to flout 
at Fortune," and these, too, were the red- 
blooded years of youth, when he was ever 
ready to "dance after a tabor and pipe" 
and pay his laughing court to many a ' ' queen 
of curds and cream." 

"But, O, the thorns we stand upon!" 

The mature charms of Anne Hathaway 
turned jest into earnest and sent prudence 
down the wind. There was a hasty wedding, 
nobody knows where, and John Shakespeare's 

175 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

burdens were presently increased by the ad- 
vent of three grandchildren. It was ob- 
viously high time for this ne'er-do-well young 
John- a- Dreams — "yet he's gentle; never 
schooled, and yet learned; full of noble de- 
vice ; of all sorts enchantingly beloved " — to 
strike out into the world and seek his fortune. 
Next to the Guild Hall stands the Guild 
Chapel, whose former frescoes of the Day of 
Judgment must have made deep impression 
on the "eye of childhood that fears a painted 
devil"; and over the way from the Guild 
Chapel is New Place. On this site in the 
time of Henry VII rose the Great House, 
built by a Stratford magnate and benefactor, 
Sir Hugh Clopton, — he who gave the town 
that "fair Bridge of Stone over Avon." In 
1597 Shakespeare, who could hardly have 
been in London a dozen years, had prospered 
so well, albeit in the disreputable crafts of 
actor and playwright, that he bought the 
estate, repaired the mansion then in "great 
ruyne and decay," and renamed it New 
Place. Yet although it was his hour of 
triumph, his heart was sorrowful, for his only 
son, his eleven-year-old Hamnet, "jewel of 
children," had died the year before. At least 

176 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

another decade passed before Shakespeare 
finally withdrew from London and settled 
down at New Place with the wife eight years 
his senior, a plain country woman of Puritan 
proclivities. In his twenty years of intense 
creative life, 

"The inward service of the mind and soul" 

must have widened beyond any possible com- 
prehension of hers, nor can his two daughters, 
unlettered and out of his world as they were, 
have had much inkling of the career and 
achievements of "so rare a wonder'd father." 
His parents were dead. Their ashes may 
now mingle with little Hamnet's in some for- 
gotten plot of the elm- shadowed churchyard. 
Of his two daughters, Susanna, the elder, had 
married a Stratford physician, and there was 
a grandchild, little Elizabeth Hall, to brighten 
the gardens of New Place. As I lingered 
there, — for the gardens remain, though the 
house is gone, — my eyes rested on a three- 
year-old lass in a fluttering white frock, — no 
wraith, though she might have been, — danc- 
ing among the flowers with such uncertain 

steps and tossing such tiny hands in air that 
12 177 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

the birds did not trouble themselves to take 
to their wings, but hopped on before her like 
playfellows. 

The deepest of the Shakespeare mysteries 
is, to my mind, the silence of those closing 
years. Were nerves and brain temporarily 
exhausted from the strain of that long period 
of continuous production ? Or had he come 
home from London sore at heart, "toss'd 
from wrong to injury," smarting from "the 
whips and scorns of time" and abjuring the 
"rough magic" of his art? Or was he, in 
"the sessions of sweet silent thought," dream- 
ing on some high, consummate poem in com- 
parison with which the poor stage- smirched 
plays seemed to him not worth the gathering 
up? Or might he, taking a leaf out of Ben 
Jonson's book, have been in fact arranging 
and rewriting his works, purging his gold 
from the dross of various collaborators ? Or 
was some new, inmost revelation of life dawn- 
ing upon him, holding him dumb with awe ? 
We can only ask, not answer; but certainly 
they err who claim that the divinest genius of 
English letters had wrought merely for house 
and land, and found his chief reward in writ- 
ing "Gentleman" after his name. 

178 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

"Sure, he that made us with such large discourse 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
That capability and godlike reason 
To rust in us unus'd." 

Shakespeare had been gentle before he was 
a gentleman, and had held ever — let his 
own words bear witness ! — 

"Virtue and cunning were endowments greater 
Than nobleness and riches." 

The gods had given him but fifty- two years 
on earth — had they granted more, he might 
have probed and uttered too many of their 
secrets — when for the last time he was ' ' with 
holy bell . . . knoll'd to church." It was 
an April day when the neighbours bore a 
hand- bier — as I saw a hand- bier borne a few 
years since across the fields from Shottery — 
the little way from New Place down Chapel 
Lane and along the Waterside — or perhaps 
by Church Street — and up the avenue, be- 
neath its blossoming limes, to Holy Trinity. 

Here, where the thousands and the millions 
come up to do reverence to this 

"Dear Son of Memory, great Heir of Fame," 

I passed a peaceful hour, ruffled only — if 
the truth must out — by the unjustifiable 

179 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

wrath which ever rises in me on reading Mrs. 
Susanna Hall's epitaph. I can forgive the 
' ' tombemaker " who wrought the bust, I can 
endure the stained-glass windows, I can over- 
look the alabaster effigy of John Combe in 
Shakespeare's chancel, but I resent the Puri- 
tan self-righteousness of the lines, — 

"Witty above her sexe, but that's not all, 
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall, 
Something of Shakespeare was in that but this 
Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse." 

Yes, I know that Shakespeare made her his 
heiress, that she was clever and charitable, 
that in July of 1643 she entertained Queen 
Henrietta Maria at New Place, but I do not 
care at all for the confusion of her bones when 
"a person named Watts" intruded into her 
grave fifty- eight years after she had taken 
possession, and I believe she used her father's 
manuscripts for wrapping up her saffron pies. 

We spent the earlier half of the afternoon 
in a drive among some of the outlying villages 
of Stratford, — first to Wilmcote, the birth- 
place of Shakespeare's mother. We dis- 
missed a fleeting thought of "Marian Hacket, 
the fat ale-wife of Wincot," and sought only 

180 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

for "Mary Arden's Cottage." Gabled and 
dormer- windowed, of stout oak timbers and 
a light brown plaster, it stands pleasantly 
within its rustic greenery. Old stone barns 
and leaning sheds help to give it an aspect 
of homely kindliness. Robert Arden's will, 
dated 1556, is the will of a good Catholic, be- 
queathing his soul to God "and to our blessed 
Lady, Saint Mary, and to all the holy com- 
pany of heaven." He directed that his body 
should be buried in the churchyard of St. 
John the Baptist in Aston- Cantlow. So we 
drove on, a little further to the northwest, 
and found an Early English church with a 
pinnacled west tower. The air was sweet 
with the roses and clematis that clambered 
up the walls. It is here, in all likelihood, 
that John Shakespeare and Mary Arden were 
married. 

We still pressed on, splashing through a 
ford and traversing a surviving bit of the 
Forest of Arden, to one village more, Wootton- 
Wawen, with a wonderful old church whose 
every stone could tell a story. Somervile the 
poet, who loved Warwickshire so well, is 
buried in the chantry chapel, and the white- 
haired rector told us proudly that Shakespeare 

181 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

had often come to service there. Indeed, 
Wootton-Wawen may have meant more to 
the great dramatist and done more to shape 
his destinies than we shall ever know, though 
Shakespeare scholarship is beginning to turn 
its searchlight on John Somervile of Edstone 
Hall, whose wife was nearly related to Mary 
Arden. Papist, as the whole Arden connec- 
tion seems to have been, John Somervile's 
brain may have given way under the political 
and religious troubles of those changeful 
Tudor times. At all events, he suddenly set 
out for London, declaring freely along the 
road that he was going to kill the Queen. Ar- 
rest, imprisonment, trial for high treason, con- 
viction, and a mysterious death in his Newgate 
cell followed in terrible sequence. Nor did 
the tragedy stop with him, but his wife, sister, 
and priest were arrested on charge of com- 
plicity, and not these only, but that quiet and 
honourable gentleman, Edward Arden of 
Park Hall in Wilmcote, with his wife and 
brother. Francis Arden and the ladies were 
in course of time released, but Edward Arden, 
who had previously incurred the enmity of 
Leicester by refusing to wear his livery, — a 
flattery to which many of the Warwickshire 

182 



THE HEART OF ENGLAND 

gentlemen eagerly stooped, — suffered, on De- 
cember 20, 1583, the brutal penalty of the law, 
— hanged and drawn and quartered, put to 
death with torture, for no other crime than 
that of having an excitable son-in-law and a 
sturdy English sense of self-respect. A sad 
and bitter Yule it must have been for his kins- 
folk in Wilmcote and in Stratford. There was 
danger in the air, too ; a hot word might give 
Sir Thomas Lucy or some zealous Protestant 
his chance; and there may well have been 
graver reasons than a poaching frolic why 
young Will Shakespeare should have disap- 
peared from the county. 



185 



THE COTSWOLDS 

1ATE in the afternoon we started out from 
a Stratford for a peep at the Cots wolds, 
swelling downs that belong in the main 
to Oxfordshire, although, as our drive soon 
revealed to us, Warwickshire, Gloucester- 
shire, Northamptonshire, and even Worces- 
tershire all come in for a share of these pastoral 
uplands. It is in the Cotswolds, not far from 
the estuary of the Severn, that the Thames 
rises and flows modestly through Oxfordshire, 
which lies wholly within its upper valley, to 
become the commerce- laden river that takes 
majestic course through the heart of London. 
We were still in the Shakespeare country, 
for his restless feet must often have roved 
these breezy wilds, famous since ancient days 
for hunts and races. "I am glad to see you, 
good Master Slender," says genial Master 
Page. And young Master Slender, with his 
customary tact, replies: "How does your 
fallow greyhound, sir? I heard say he was 

184 



THE COTSWOLDS 

outrun on Cotsol." Whereupon Master Page 
retorts a little stiffly : "It could not be judged, 
sir," and Slender chuckles: "You'll not con- 
fess ; you '11 not confess." Why could it not 
be judged ? For one of the delights of the 
Cotswold hunt — so hunters say — is the 
clear view on this open tableland of the strain- 
ing pack. Shakespeare knew well the "gal- 
lant chiding" of the hounds, — how, when 
they "spend their mouths," 

"Echo replies 
As if another chase were in the skies." 

Here he may have seen his death- pressed 
hare, "poor Wat," try to baffle his pursuers 
and confuse the scent by running among the 
sheep and deer and along the banks "where 
earth-delving conies keep." 

Still about our route clung, like a silver 
mist, Shakespeare traditions. In the now 
perished church of Luddington, two miles 
south of Stratford, the poet, it is said, married 
Anne Hathaway; but the same bridal is 
claimed for the venerable church of Temple 
Grafton, about a mile distant, and again for 
the neighbouring church of Billesley. Long 
Marston, "Dancing Marston," believes its 

185 



THE COTSWOLDS 

sporting-ground was in the mind of the pren- 
tice playwright, a little homesick yet in Lon- 
don, when he wrote: 

"The Nine-Men's Morris is filled up with mud; 
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, 
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable." 

At Lower Quinton stands an old manor- 
house of whose library — such is the whisper 
that haunts its folios — Will Shakespeare 
was made free. A happy picture that — of 
an eager lad swinging across the fields and 
leaping stiles to enter into his paradise of 
books. 

We were well into Gloucestershire before 
this, that tongue of Gloucestershire which 
runs up almost to Stratford-on-Avon, and 
were driving on in the soft twilight, now past 
the old-time Common Fields with their fur- 
longs divided by long balks ; now over roll- 
ing reaches, crossed by low stone walls, of 
sheep-walk and water-meadow and wheat- 
land, with here and there a fir plantation or 
a hazel covert; now through a strange grey 
hamlet built of the native limestone. Our 
road was gradually rising, and just before 
nightfall we came into Chipping Campden, 

18G 



THE COTSWOLDS 

most beautiful of the old Cotswold towns. We 
had not dreamed that England held its like, 
— one long, wide, stately street, bordered by 
silent fronts of great stone houses, with here 
and there the green of mantling ivy, but 
mainly with only the rich and changeful 
colouring of the stone itself, grey in shadow, 
golden in the sun. Campden was for cen- 
turies a famous centre of the wool trade ; the 
Cotswolds served it as a broad grazing-ground 
whose flocks furnished wool for the skilful 
Flemish weavers; its fourteenth century 
Woolstaplers' Hall still stands; its open 
market-house, built in 1624 midway of the 
mile-long street, is one of its finest features; 
its best-remembered name is that of William 
Grevel, described on his monumental brass 
(1401) as "Flower of the Wool-merchants of 
all England." He bequeathed a hundred 
marks toward the building of the magnifi- 
cent church, which stood complete, as we see 
it now, in the early fifteenth century. Its 
glorious tower, tall and light, yet not too 
slender, battlemented, turreted, noble in all 
its proportions, is a Cotswold landmark. As 
we were feasting our eyes, after an evening 
stroll, upon the symmetries of that grand 

187 



THE COTSWOLDS 

church, wonderfully impressive as it rose in 
the faint moonlight above a group of strange, 
pagoda-roofed buildings, its chimes rang out 
a series of sweet old tunes, all the more 
poignantly appealing in that the voices of 
those ancient bells were thin and tremulous, 
and now and then a note was missed. 

The fascinations of Campden held us the 
summer day long. We must needs explore 
the church interior, which has suffered at the 
hands of the restorer ; yet its chancel brasses, 
wrought with figures of plump woolstaplers, 
their decorous and comely dames, and their 
kneeling children, reward a close survey. I 
especially rejoiced in one complacent burgher, 
attended by three wimpled wives, and a long 
row of sons and daughters all of the same size. 
There is a curious chapel, too, where we came 
upon the second Viscount Campden, in marble 
shroud and coronet, ceremoniously handing, 
with a most cynical and unholy expression, 
his lady from the sepulchre. There was a 
ruined guildhall to see, and some antique 
almshouses of distinguished beauty. As we 
looked, an old man came feebly forth and 
bowed his white head on the low enclosing 
wall in an attitude of grief or prayer. We 

188 




TOVVEJt OF CHIPIJNG CAMPDEN CHURCH 



THE COTSWOLDS 

learned later that one of the inmates had died 
that very hour. We went over the works of 
the new Guild of Handicraft, an attempt to 
realise, here in the freshness of the wolds, the 
ideals of Ruskin and Morris. We cast wist- 
ful eyes up at Dover's Hill, on whose level 
summit used to be held at Whitsuntide the 
merry Cotswold Games. "Heigh for Cots- 
wold!" But it was the hottest day of the 
summer, and we contented ourselves with 
the phrase. 

Other famous Cotswold towns are "Stow- 
on-the-Wold, where the wind blows cold"; 
Northleach in the middle of the downs, deso- 
late now, but once full of the activities of those 
wool-merchants commemorated by quaint 
brasses in the splendid church, — brasses 
which show them snugly at rest in their furred 
gowns, with feet comfortably planted on 
stuffed woolpack or the fleecy back of a sheep, 
or, more precariously, on a pair of shears; 
Burford, whose High Street and church are 
as noteworthy as Campden's own; Winch- 
combe, once a residence of the Mercian kings 
and a famous shrine of pilgrimage; Ciren- 
cester, the "Capital of the Cotswolds," built 
above a ruined Roman city and possessing a 

189 



THE COTSWOLDS 

church of surpassing richness. How we 
longed for months of free-footed wandering 
over these exhilarating uplands with their 
grey settlements like chronicles writ in stone ! 
But Father Time was shaking his hour-glass 
just behind us, in his marplot fashion, and 
since it had to be a choice, we took the even- 
ing train to Chipping Norton. 

I regret to say that Chipping Norton, the 
highest town in Oxfordshire, showed little 
appreciation of the compliment. It was not 
easy to find lodging and wellnigh impossible 
to get carriage conveyance back to Campden 
the next day. It is a thriving town, ranking 
third in the county, and turns out a goodly 
supply of leather gloves and the "Chipping 
Norton tweeds." The factory folk were, 
many of them, having their holiday just then ; 
their friends were coming for the week-end 
and had one and all, it would seem, set their 
hearts on being entertained by a Saturday 
drive; the only victoria for hire in the place 
was going to Oxford to bring an invalid lady 
home; altogether the hostlers washed their 
hands — merely in metaphor — of the two 
gad-abouts who thought Chipping Norton 
not good enough to spend Sunday in. Before 

190 



THE COTSWOLDS 

we slept, however, we had succeeded in en- 
gaging, at different points, a high wagonette, 
a gaunt horse, and a bashful boy, and the com- 
bination stood ready for us at nine o'clock 
in the morning. 

Meanwhile we had seen the chief sights of 
this venerable town, whose name is equiva- 
lent to Market Norton. Its one wide street, 
a handsome, tree- shadowed thoroughfare with 
the Town Hall set like an island in its midst, 
runs up the side and along the brow of a steep 
plateau. A narrow way plunges down from 
this central avenue and passes a seven-gabled 
row of delectable almshouses, dated 1640. 
Indeed, no buildings in these Midland coun- 
ties have more architectural charm than their 
quaint shelters for indigent old age. The 
abrupt lane leads to a large grey church, 
square- towered and perpendicular, like the 
church of Chipping Campden, but with a few 
Early English traces. Its peculiar feature is 
the glass clerestory, — great square windows 
divided from one another by the pillars of the 
nave. The sexton opened the doors for us 
so early that we had leisure to linger a little 
before the old altar- stone with its five crosses, 
before St. Mary's banner bordered with her 

191 



THE COTSWOLDS 

own blue, before the warrior pillowed on his 
helmet and praying his last prayer beside his 
lady, whose clasped hands, even in the time- 
worn alabaster, have a dimpled, chubby, 
coaxing look ; and before those characteristic 
merchant brasses, the men in tunics with 
close sleeves and girdles, one of them stand- 
ing with each foot on a woolpack, the women 
in amazing head-dresses, "horned" and 
" pedimented," and all the work so carefully 
and elaborately wrought that the Cotswold 
brasses are authorities for the costume of the 
period. 

One of the main objects of this expedition, 
however, was the drive back over the hills 
with their far views of down and wold to 
whose vegetation the limestone imparts a 
peculiar tint of blue. We deviated from the 
Campden road to see the Rollright Stones, 
a hoary army with their leader well in ad- 
vance. He, the King Stone, is across the 
Warwickshire line, but, curiously enough, a 
little below the summit which looks out over 
the Warwickshire plain. This monolith, 
eight or nine feet high, fantastically suggests 
a huge body drawn back as if to brace itself 
against the fling of some tremendous curse. 

192 



THE COTSWOLDS 

The tale tells how, in those good old times 
before names and dates had to be remembered, 
a petty chief, who longed to extend his sway 
over all Britain, had come thus far on his 
northward march. But here, when he was 
almost at the crest of the hill, when seven 
strides more would have brought him where 
he could see the Warwickshire village of 
Long Compton on the other side, out popped 
an old witch, as wicked as a thorn- bush, with 
the cry: 

"If Long Compton thou canst see, 
King of England thou shalt be." 

On bounded the chief — what were seven 
steps to reach a throne ! — but the wooded 
summit, still shutting off his view, rose faster 
than he, and again the eldritch screech was 
heard : 

"Rise up, stick! stand still, stone! 
King of England thou shalt be none." 

And there he stands to this day, even as the 
spell froze him, while the sorceress, disguised 
as an elder tree, keeps watch over her victim. 
The fairies steal out from a hole in the bank 
on moonlight nights and weave their dances 
13 193 



THE COTSWOLDS 

round him. No matter how securely the 
children of the neighbourhood fit a flat stone 
over the hole at bedtime, every morning finds 
it thrust aside. We would not for the world 
have taken liberties with that elfin portal, but 
if we had been sure which of the several elder 
trees was the witch, we might have cut at her 
with our penknives and seen, — it is averred 
by many, — as her sap began to flow and her 
strength to fail, the contorted stone strain and 
struggle to free itself from the charm. And 
had we seen that, I am afraid we should forth- 1 
with have desisted from our hacking and taken 
to our heels. As it was, the place had an 
uncanny feel, and we went back into Oxford- 
shire some eighty yards to review the main 
body of the army, 

"a dismal cirque 
Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor." 

These mysterious monuments, which in the 
day of the Venerable Bede were no less re- 
markable than Stonehenge, have been ravaged 
by time, but some sixty of them — their magic 
baffles an exact count — remain. Grey Druid 
semblances, heathen to the core, owl-faced, 
monkey- faced, they stand in a great, ragged 

194 



THE COTSWOLDS 

circle, enclosing a clump of firs. Deeply 
sunken in the ground, they are of uneven 
height; some barely peep above the surface; 
the tallest rises more than seven feet; some 
lie prone; some bend sideways; all have an 
aspect of extreme antiquity, a perforated, 
worm-eaten look the reverse of prepossessing. 
But our visit was ill-timed. If we had had 
the hardihood to climb up to that wind-swept 
waste at midnight, we should have seen those 
crouching goblins spring erect, join hands and 
gambol around in an ungainly ring, trampling 
down the thistles and shocking every church 
spire in sight. At midnight of All Saints they 
make a mad rush down the hillside for their 
annual drink of water at a spring below. 

The antiquaries who hold that these strange 
stones were erected not as a Druid temple, nor 
as memorials of victory, nor for the election 
and inauguration of primitive kings, but for 
sepulchral purposes, rest their case largely on 
the Whispering Knights. This third group 
is made up of five stones which apparently 
once formed a cromlech and may have been 
originally covered with a mound. They are 
some quarter of a mile behind the circle, — a 
bad quarter of a mile I found it as I struggled 

195 



THE COTSWOLDS 

across the rugged moor knee- deep in rank 
clover and other withering weeds. Just be- 
fore me would fly up partridges with a startled 
whirr, hovering so near in their bewilderment 
that I could almost have knocked a few of 
them down with my parasol, if that had ap- 
pealed to me as a pleasant and friendly thing 
to do. For this was a "cover," destined to 
give a few of Blake's and Shelley's country- 
men some autumn hours of brutalising sport. 

"Each outcry of the hunted hare 
A fibre from the brain doth tear. 
A skylark wounded in the wing; 
A cherubim doth cease to sing." 

The Five Knights lean close together, yet 
without touching, enchanted to stone in the 
very act of whispering treason against their 
ambitious chief. They whisper still under 
the elder tree, and often will a lass labouring 
in the barley fields slip away from her com- 
panions at dusk to beg the Five Knights to 
whisper her an answer to the question of her 
heart. I walked back, having hit on a path, 
in company with a rustic harvester, whose 
conversation was confined to telling me five 
times over, in the stubborn, half- scared tone 

196 



THE COTSWOLDS 

of superstition, that while the other elders are 
laden with white berries, this elder always 
bears red; and the collie wagged his tail, 
and the donkey wagged his ears, in solemn 
confirmation. 

The wagonette gathered us in again, and 
soon we passed, not far from the fine Eliza- 
bethan mansion known as Chastleton House, 
the Four- Shire Stone, a column marking the 
meeting- point of Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, 
Gloucestershire, and Worcestershire. Our 
route lay for a while in Gloucestershire. As 
our shy young driver refreshed our skeleton 
steed, which had proved a good roadster, with 
gruel, that favourite beverage of English 
horses, at Moreton- in- the- Marsh, another 
little grey stone town with open market-hall, 
we noted a building marked P. S. A. and 
learned it was a workingman's club, or some- 
thing of that nature, and that the cabalistic 
initials stood for Pleasant Sunday After- 
noon. We changed horses at Campden, did 
our duty by the inevitable cold joints, and 
drove up to Fish Inn, with its far outlook, 
and thence down into the fertile Vale of 
Evesham. We had not been ready to say 
with Richard II, 

197 



THE COTSWOLDS 

"I am a stranger here in Glostershire; 
These high wild hills and rough uneven ways 
Draw out our miles, and make them wearisome," 

but we found a new pleasure in the smiling 
welcome of gardened Worcestershire. The 
charming village of Broadway, beloved of 
artists, detained us for a little, and at Evesham, 
even more attractive with its beautiful bell- 
tower, its Norman gateway and cloister arch 
— pathetic relics of its ruined abbey — and 
with its obelisk- marked battlefield where fell 
Simon de Montfort, "the most peerless man 
of his time for valour, personage, and wis- 
dom," we brought our driving- tour in the 
Midlands to a close. 



198 



OXFORD 

SHAKESPEARE'S frequent horseback 
journeys from London to Stratford, and 
from Stratford to London, must have 
made him familiar with the county of Oxford- 
shire. He would have seen its northern up- 
lands sprinkled over with white- fleeced sheep 
of the pure old breed, sheep so large that their 
mutton is too fat for modern palates: a 
smaller sheep, yielding inferior wool, is fast 
supplanting the original Cots wold. He would 
not have met upon the downs those once so 
frequent passengers, the Flemish merchants 
with their trains of sumpter mules and pack- 
horses, bound for Chipping Campden or some 
other market where wool might be "cheap- 
ened " in the way of bargaining, for by Shake- 
speare's day the cloth-making industry in 
the valley of the Stroud Water, Gloucester- 
shire, had attained to such a flourishing con- 
dition that the export of raw material was 
forbidden. 

199 



OXFORD 

It is not likely that his usual route would 
have given him the chance to refresh himself 
with Banbury cakes at Banbury and, profane 
player that he was, bring down upon himself 
a Puritan preachment from Ben Jonson's 
Zeal - of - the - land - Busy ; but Shakespeare's 
way would almost certainly have lain through 
Woodstock. This ancient town has royal 
traditions reaching back to King Alfred and 
Etheldred the Redeless, but these are ob- 
scured for the modern tourist by the heavy 
magnificence of Blenheim Palace, the Duke 
of Marlborough's reward for his "famous 
victory." The legend of Fair Rosamund — 
how Henry II hid her here embowered in a 
labyrinth, and how the murderous Queen 
Eleanor tracked her through the maze by the 
clue of a silken thread — Shakespeare, like 
Drayton, could have enjoyed without moles- 
tation from the critical historian, who now 
insists that it was Eleanor whom the king 
shut up to keep her from interfering with his 
loves. Poor Rosamund! Her romance is 
not suffered to rest in peace here any more 
than was her fair body in the church of God- 
stow nunnery. There she had been buried in 
the centre of the choir, and the nuns honoured 

200 



OXFORD 

her grave with such profusion of broidered 
hangings and burning tapers as to scandalise 
St. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, who, on visiting 
the nunnery in 1191, gave orders that she be 
disinterred and buried " out of the church 
with other common people to the end that 
religion be not vilified." But after some 
years the tender nuns slipped those rejected 
bones into a "perfumed leather bag" and 
brought them back within the holy pale. The 
dramatist, who seems to have done wellnigh 
his earliest chronicle- play writing in an epi- 
sode of the anonymous "Edward III," may 
have remembered, as he rode into the old 
town, that the Black Prince was born at 
Woodstock. But whether or no he gave a 
thought to Edward Ill's war- wasted heir, he 
could hardly have failed to muse upon that 
monarch's poet, " most sacred happie spirit," 
Geoffrey Chaucer, whose son Thomas — if this 
Thomas Chaucer were indeed the poet's son 
— resided at Woodstock in the early part of the 
fifteenth century. And still fresh would have 
been the memory of Elizabeth's imprisonment 
in the gate-house during a part of her sis- 
ter Mary's reign. It was here, according to 
Holinshed, on whom the burden of pronouns 

201 



OXFORD 

rested lightly, that the captive princess "hear- 
ing upon a time out of hir garden at Wood- 
stock a certaine milkemaid singing pleasantlie 
wished herselfe to be a milkemaid as she was, 
saieing that hir case was better, and life more 
merier than was hirs in that state as she was." 
Charles I and the Roundheads had not then 
set their battle-marks all over Oxfordshire, 
and Henley, now famed for its July regatta 
as far as water flows, was still content with 
the very moderate speed of its malt-barges; 
but Oxford — I would give half my library to 
know with what feelings Shakespeare used to 
behold its sublime group of spires and towers 
against the sunset sky. This "upstart crow," 
often made to wince under the scorn of those 
who, like Robert Greene, — the red-headed 
reprobate ! — could write themselves ' ' Master 
of Arts of both Universities," what manner of 
look did he turn upon that august town 

"gorgeous with high-built colleges, 
And scholars seemly in their grave attire, 
Learned in searching principles of art ? " 

Here in the midst of the valley of the 
Thames, Oxford had already kept for cen- 
turies a queenly state, chief city of the shire, 

202 



OXFORD 

with a university that ranked as one of the 
"two eyes of England." The university, 
then as now, was made up of a number of 
colleges which owned, by bequest and by pur- 
chase, a considerable portion of the county, 
though they by no means limited their estates 
to Oxfordshire. Almost all those "sacred 
nurseries of blooming youth" which delight 
us to-day were known to the dust- stained 
traveller who put up, perhaps twice a year, 
perhaps oftener, at the Crown Inn, kept by 
John Davenant, vintner. Apart from the 
painfully modern Keble, a memorial to the 
author of "The Christian Year," and the still 
more recent roof- trees for dissent, Congre- 
gational Mansfield and Unitarian Manchester, 
what college of modern Oxford would be 
utterly strange to Shakespeare? Even in 
Worcester, an eighteenth- century erection on 
the site of the ruined Benedictine foundation 
of Gloucester College, search soon reveals 
vestiges of the old monastic dwellings. Not 
a few of the very edifices that Shakespeare 
saw still stand in their Gothic beauty, but in 
case of others, as University, which disputes 
with Merton the claim of seniority, boasting 
no less a founder than Alfred the Great, new 

203 



OXFORD 

buildings have overgrown the old. Some 
have changed their names, as Broadgates, to 
which was given, eight years after Shake- 
speare's death, a name that even in death 
he would hardly have forgotten, — Pem- 
broke, in honour of William, Earl of Pem- 
broke, then Chancellor of the University. 
Already venerable, as the poet looked upon 
them, were the thirteenth- century founda- 
tions of Merton, with its stately tower, its 
library of chained folios, its memories of Duns 
Scotus ; and Balliol, another claimant for the 
dignities of the first-born, tracing its origin to 
Sir John de Balliol, father of the Scottish king, 
remembering among its early Fellows and 
Masters John Wyclif the Reformer; and 
Hart Hall, where Tyndale was a student, the 
Hertford College of to-day ; and St. Edmund 
Hall, which has been entirely rebuilt. An- 
other thirteenth- century foundation, St. Alban 
Hall, has been incorporated with Merton. 

The fourteenth- century colleges, too, would 
have worn a weathered look by 1600, — 
Exeter and Oriel and Queen's and New. The 
buildings of Exeter have been restored over 
and over, but the mediaeval still haunts them, 
as it haunted Exeter's latest poet, William 

204 



OXFORD 

Morris, who loved Oxfordshire so well that 
he finally made his home at Kelmscott on the 
Upper Thames. Oriel, which, as Shake- 
speare would have known, was Sir Walter 
Raleigh's college, underwent an extensive 
rebuilding in the reign of Charles I. To 
Oriel once belonged St. Mary Hall, where Sir 
Thomas More studied, — a wag of a student 
he must have been ! — and now, after an in- 
dependence of five hundred years, it is part 
of Oriel again. Queen's, named in honour 
of Philippa, the consort of Edward III, has 
so completely changed its outer fashion that 
George II's Queen Caroline is perched upon 
its cupola, but by some secret of individuality 
it is still the same old college of the Black 
Prince and of Henry V, — the college where 
every evening a trumpet summons the men 
to dine in hall, and every Christmas the Boar's 
Head, garnished with the traditionary green- 
ery, is borne in to the singing of an old-time 
carol, and every New Year's Day the bursar 
distributes thread and needles among its 
unappreciative masculine community with 
the succinct advice: "Take this and be 
thrifty." 

New College, unlike these three, has hardly 
205 



OXFORD 

altered its original fabric. If Shakespeare 
smiled over the name borne by a structure 
already mossed and lichened by two centu- 
ries, we have more than twice his reason for 
smiling ; indeed, we have one excuse that he 
had not, for we can think of Sydney Smith as 
a New College man. Old it is and old it 
looks. The very lanes that lead to it, grey 
and twisted passages of stone, conduct us 
back to the mediaeval world. The Virgin 
Mary, the Archangel Gabriel, and, no whit 
abashed in such high company, Bishop Wyke- 
ham, the Founder, watch us from their storm- 
worn niches as we pass under the gateway 
into the majestic quadrangle. Here time- 
blackened walls hold the gaze enthralled with 
their ancientry of battlements and buttresses, 
deep-mullioned windows and pinnacle- set 
towers. Beyond lie the gardens, still bounded 
on two sides by the massive masonry, embra- 
sured, bastioned, parapeted, of the old City 
Wall, — gardens where it should always be 
October, drifty, yellow, dreamy, quiet, with 
wan poplars and aspens and chestnuts whis- 
pering and sighing together, till some gro- 
tesque face sculptured on the wall peers out 
derisively through ivy mat or crimson creeper, 

206 



OXFORD 

and the red- berried hollies, old and gay 
with many Christmases, rustle in reassuring 
laughter. Meanwhile the rooks flap heavily 
among the mighty beeches, whose tremen- 
dous trunks are all misshapen with the gnarls 
and knobs of age. 

Of the fifteenth- century foundations, All 
Souls, "The College of All Souls of the Faith- 
ful Departed," and especially of those who 
fell in the French wars, retains much of its 
original architecture; in the kitchen of Lin- 
coln, if not in the chapel, Shakespeare would 
still find himself at home ; and for him, as for 
all the generations since, the lofty tower of 
Magdalen rose as Oxford's crown of beauty. 
Magdalen College is ancient. The very 
speaking of the name (Maudlin) tells us that, 
all the more unmistakably because Magdalen 
Bridge and Magdalen Street carry the modern 
pronunciation. But Magdalen College, with 
its springing, soaring grace, its surprises of 
delight, its haunting, soul-possessing loveli- 
ness, has all the winning charm of youth. Its 
hundred acres of lawn and garden, wood and 
park, where deer browse peacefully beneath 
the shade of giant elms and where Addison's 
beloved Water Walks beside the Cherwell are 

207 



OXFORD 

golden with the primroses and daffodils of 
March and blue with the violets and peri- 
winkles of later spring, are even more tempt- 
ing to the book-fagged wanderer than Christ 
Church Meadow and "Mesopotamia." It is 
hard to tell when Magdalen is most beautiful. 
It has made the circle of the year its own. On 
May Day dawn, all Oxford, drowsy but de- 
termined, gathers in the broad street below 
to see — it depends upon the wind whether 
or no one may hear — the choir chant their 
immemorial hymn from the summit of the 
tower. When the ending of the rite is made 
known to the multitude by the flinging over 
of the caps, — black mortar-boards that sail 
slowly down the one hundred and fifty feet 
like a flock of pensive rooks, — then away it 
streams over Magdalen Bridge toward Iffley 
to gather Arnold's white and purple fritilla- 
ries, and, after a long and loving look at Iffley's 
Norman Church, troops home along the 
towing-path beside the Isis. Shakespeare 
may himself have heard, if he chanced to 
be passing through on St. John Baptist's 
Day, the University sermon preached from 
the curiously canopied stone pulpit well up 
on the wall in a corner of one of the quad- 

208 



OXFORD 

rangles, while the turf was sweet with strewn 
rushes and all the buildings glistening with 
fresh green boughs. But even in midwinter 
Magdalen is beautiful, when along Addison's 
Walk the fog is frosted like most delicate 
enamel on every leaf and twig, and this 
white world of rime takes on strange flushes 
from the red sun peering through the haze. 

Of the six Tudor foundations, Trinity 
occupies the site of Durham College, a thir- 
teenth-century Benedictine institution sup- 
pressed by Henry VIII; St. John's, closely 
allied to the memory of Archbishop Laud, is 
the survival of St. Bernard College, which 
itself grew out of a Cistercian monastery; 
Brasenose, associated for earlier memory with 
Foxe of the "Book of Martyrs" and for later 
with Walter Pater, supplanted two mediaeval 
halls; and Jesus College, the first to be 
founded after the Reformation, endowed by 
a Welshman for the increase of Welsh learn- 
ing, received from Elizabeth a site once held 
by academic buildings of the elder faith. 
Only Corpus Christi, where Cardinal Pole and 
Bishop Hooker studied to such different ends, 
although it is, as its name indicates, of Cath- 
olic origin, rose on fresh soil and broke with 
14 209 



OXFORD 

the past, with the mediaeval educational tradi- 
tion, by making regular provision for the sys- 
tematic study of Latin and Greek. 

The great Tudor foundation was Christ 
Church, built on the sacred ground where, in 
the eighth century, St. Frideswide, a princess 
with a pronounced 'vocation for the religious 
life, had erected a nunnery of which she was 
first abbess. The nunnery became, after her 
death, a house of canons, known as St. Fri- 
deswide's Priory. Cardinal Wolsey brought 
about the surrender of this priory to the king, 
and its prompt transfer to himself, some fif- 
teen years before the general Dissolution. 
His ambition, not all unrealised, was to found 
as his memorial a splendid seat of the New 
Learning at Oxford to be called Cardinal's 
College. He had gone so far as to erect a 
magnificent hall, with fan-vaulted entrance 
and carved oak ceiling of surpassing beauty, 
a kitchen ample enough to feed the Titans, 
"The Faire Gate" and, in outline, the Great 
Quadrangle, for whose enlargement he pulled 
down three bays of the Priory church, when 
his fall cut short his princely projects. His 
graceless master attempted to take over to 
himself the credit of Wokey's labours, sub- 

210 



OXFORD 

stituting the name of King Henry VIII's 
College, but on creating, a few years later, the 
bishopric of Oxford, he blended the cathe- 
dral and college foundations as the Church 
and House of Christ. The cathedral fabric 
is still in the main that of the old Priory 
church. Of the several quadrangles, Can- 
terbury Quad keeps a memory of Canterbury 
College, which, with the other Benedictine 
colleges, Gloucester and Durham, went down 
in the storm. Christ's Church — "The 
House," as its members call it — is the aris- 
tocratic college of Oxford. Noblemen and 
even princes may be among those white- 
surpliced figures that flit about the dim quads 
after Sunday evensong. Ruskin's father, a 
wealthy wine-merchant of refined tastes and 
broad intelligence, hesitated to enter his son 
as a gentleman commoner at Christ's lest the 
act should savour of presumption. Yet no 
name has conferred more lustre on "The 
House" than that of him who became the 
Slade Professor of Fine Arts, waking all Ox- 
ford to nobler life and resigning, at last, be- 
cause he could not bear that the university 
should sanction vivisection. 

Wadham College, though the lovely garden 
211 



OXFORD 

with its hoary walls starred by jasmine and its 
patriarchal cedars casting majestic shadows 
— a garden that rivals for charm even those 
of St. John's and Worcester and Exeter — 
has such a venerable air, is the youngest of all 
these. Its first stone was laid, on a site for- 
merly occupied by a priory of Augustinian 
Friars, only six years before Shakespeare's 
death. In his later journeys he would not 
have failed to note the progress of its 
erection. 

But if Shakespeare saw, as he rode through 
Oxford, almost all the colleges that may now 
be seen, he also saw much that has crumbled 
away into an irretrievable past. Not only 
were the various colleges, halls, priories, and 
friaries of the monastic orders still in visible 
ruin, but the great abbeys of Osney and of 
Rewley, the former one of the largest and 
richest in all England, still made the appeal 
of a beautiful desolation. No wonder that 
Shakespeare compared the naked branches 
of autumn, that wintry end of the season 

"When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang 
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold," 

to 

"bare, ruined choirs." 
212 



OXFORD 

If, as seems probable, the Arden sympa- 
thies lingered long with the Mother Church, 
if Shakespeare did not forget, even in those 
closing years when his homeward trips 
brought him to a Puritan household and an 
ever more Puritan town, the bitter fate of his 
kinsmen of Wilmcote and Wootton-Wawen, 
he must have been keenly alive to these ravages 
of the Reformation. Yet he had been some 
twenty years at the vortex of Elizabethan life, 
in the very seethe of London; he had wit- 
nessed many a wrong and many a tragedy; 
he was versed to weariness of heart in the 
"hostile strokes" that befall humanity, in all 
the varied 

"throes 
That nature's fragile vessel doth sustain 
In life's uncertain voyage"; 

and he knew, no man better, that Right is not 
of one party, nor Truth of a single creed. He 
must have mused, as he took the air in Oxford 
streets after Mistress Davenant had served his 
supper, on the three great Protestant Martyrs 
of whose suffering some of the elder folk with 
whom he chatted had been eyewitnesses. 
The commemorative cross that may now be 
seen in front of Balliol, near the church of St. 

213 



OXFORD 

Mary Magdalen whose tower was a familiar 
sight to Shakespeare's eyes, displays in richly 
fretted niches the statues of "Thomas Cran- 
mer, Nicolas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Prelates 
of the Church of England, who near this spot 
yielded their bodies to be burned." Most of 
all, his thought would have dwelt on Cranmer, 
that pathetic figure whose life was such a 
mingled yarn of good and evil. He had won 
the favour of Henry VIII by approving the 
divorce of Queen Catherine. He had beheld 
— and in some cases furthered — the down- 
falls of Sir Thomas More, of Anne Boleyn, of 
Wolsey, of Cromwell, of Catherine Howard, 
of Seymour, and of Somerset. He had stood 
godfather to Elizabeth and to Edward. He 
had watched over the death- bed of the tyrant ; 
he had crowned that tyrant's frail young son 
as Edward VI. When by his adherence to 
the cause of Lady Jane Grey he had in- 
curred sentence of treason, he was pardoned 
by Queen Mary. Yet this pardon only 
amounted to a transfer from the Tower of 
London to the Bocardo in Oxford, that prison- 
house over the North Gate from whose stone 
cells used to come down the hoarse cry of 
cold and hunger: "Pity the Bocardo birds." 

214 



OXFORD 

There were those still living in Oxford who 
could have told the dramatist, as he gazed up 
through the moonlight (for who does not ?) to 
the pinnacled spire of St. Mary- the- Virgin, 
all the detail of those April days, only ten 
years before his birth, when Cranmer, with 
Ridley and Latimer, was brought into the 
church and bidden, before a hostile assem- 
blage of divines, to justify the heresies of the 
new prayer-book. On the Tuesday Cranmer 
pleaded from eight till two ; Ridley was heard 
on the Wednesday, and on the Thursday the 
aged Latimer, a quaint champion as he stood 
there "with a kerchief and two or three caps 
on his head, his spectacles hanging by a string 
at his breast, and a staff in his hand." On 
the Friday all three were condemned. After 
a year and a half of continued confinement, 
Archbishop Cranmer, whose irresolution was 
such that, from first to last, he wrote seven 
recantations, was made to look out from his 
prison window upon the tormented death of 
his friends. Then it was that the stanch old 
Latimer, bowed with the weight of fourscore 
years, but viewing the fagots undismayed, 
spake the never- forgotten words: "Be of 
good comfort, Master Ridley. We shall this 

215 



OXFORD 

day light such a candle, by God's grace, in 
England, as I trust shall never be put out." 
Cranmer's own end came six months later, 
on March 21, 1556. He was first brought to 
St. Mary's that he might publicly abjure his 
heresies. But at that desperate pass, no 
longer tempted by the hope of life, — for hope 
there was none, — his manhood returned to 
him with atoning dignity and force. Prison- 
wasted, in ragged gown, a man of sixty-seven 
years, he clearly avowed his Protestant faith, 
declaring that he had penned his successive 
recantations in fear of the pains of death, and 
adding: "Forasmuch as my hand offended 
in writing contrary to my heart, my hand 
therefore shall be first punished ; for if I may 
come to the fire, it shall be the first burnt." 
And having so "flung down the burden of his 
shame," he put aside those who would still 
have argued with him and fairly ran to the 
stake, 

"Outstretching flameward his upbraided hand." 

The university church, this beautiful St. 
Mary's, has other memories. From its pulpit 
Wyclif proclaimed such daring doctrines that 
Lincoln College was founded to refute them, 

216 



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— Lincoln, which came to number among 
its Fellows John Wesley and to shelter those 
first Methodist meetings, the sessions of his 
"Holy Club.' , In St. Mary's choir rests the 
poor bruised body of Amy Robsart. The 
spiral-columned porch was erected by Laud's 
chaplain, and its statue of the Virgin and 
Child so scandalised the Puritans that they 
pressed it into service for one of their articles 
of impeachment directed against the doomed 
archbishop. 

What could the thronging student life of 
Oxford have meant to the author of "Ham- 
let"? Of his careless young teachers in 
stage- craft — so soon his out-distanced rivals 

— Lyly and Peele and Lodge would have 
been at home beside the Isis and the Cherwell, 
as Greene and Nash and Marlowe by the 
Cam ; but Shakespeare — did those flutter- 
ing gowns, those gaudy-hooded processions, 
stir in him more than a stranger's curiosity ? 
The stern day of that all-learned Master of 
Balliol, Dr. Jowett, who stiffened examina- 
tions to a point that would have dismayed 
Shakespeare's contemporaries, save, perhaps, 
the redoubtable Gabriel Harvey, was still in 
the far future ; the magnificent New Schools, 

217 



OXFORD 

with their dreaded viva voces, had not yet 
come ; the Rhodes Scholarships were beyond 
the dream-reach of even a Raleigh or a 
Spenser; but academic tests and academic 
pomps there were. The Old Schools Quad- 
rangle, not quite complete, had been building 
in a leisurely way since 1439 and was in 
regular use, though the Divinity School, 
whose arched, groined, boss-studded roof is 
one of the beauties of Oxford, had nearly suf- 
fered wreck, in the brief reign of Edward VI, 
at the hands of that class of theological re- 
formers who have a peculiar aversion to 
stained glass. The exercises of the Encaenia 
Shakespeare would have heard, if he ever 
chanced to hear them, in St. Mary's, but half 
a century after his death they were trans- 
ferred to the new Sheldonian Theatre. In 
St. Mary's, which was not only "Learning's 
receptacle " but also " Religion's parke," these 
exercises, the Acts, naturally took the form 
of disputations concerning "wingy mysteries 
in divinity." When they passed out from the 
church to an unconsecrated edifice, political 
and social themes, still treated in scholastic 
Latin, were added, but even so the entertain- 
ment was of the dullest. Professional fun- 

218 



OXFORD 

makers, successors of the mediaeval minstrels, 
had to be called in to enliven the occasion with 
a peppering of jests, but these became so 
scurrilous that the use of hired buffoons 
was forbidden by Convocation. Then the 
resourceful undergraduates magnanimously 
came forward, volunteering to take this deli- 
cate duty upon themselves, and manfully have 
they discharged it to this day. These young 
Oxonians have developed the normal under- 
graduate gift for sauce into an art that even 
knows the laws of proportion and restraint. 
The limits allowed them are of the broadest, 
but only twice in living memory has their 
mischief gone so far as to break up the 
assemblage. 

The threefold business of the annual En- 
caenia is to confer honorary degrees, to listen 
to the prize compositions, and to hear an ad- 
dress delivered by the Public Orator in com- 
memoration of Founders and Benefactors, 
with comment on current events. On the 
one occasion when I was privileged to be 
present, the hour preceding the entrance of 
the academic procession was the liveliest of all. 
The lower galleries were reserved for guests, 
but the upper, the Undergraduates' Gallery, 

219 



OXFORD 

was packed with students in cap and gown, 
who promptly began to badger individuals 
chosen at whim from the throng of men 
standing on the floor. 

"I don't like your bouquet, sir. It's too 
big for your buttonhole. If the lady would n't 
mind — " 

The offending roses disappeared in a gen- 
eral acclaim of "Thank you, sir," and the 
cherubs aloft pounced on another victim. 
The unfortunates so thrust into universal 
notice usually complied with the request, 
whatever it might be, as quickly as possible, 
eager to escape into obscurity, but a certain 
square-jawed Saxon wearing a red tie put up 
a stubborn resistance until all the topmost 
gallery was shouting at him, and laughing 
faces were turned upon him from every 
quarter of the house. 

"Take off that red tie, sir." 
"Indeed, sir, you don't look pretty in it." 
"It doesn't go well with your blushes." 
"Will you take off that tie, sir?" 
"It's not to our cultured taste, sir." 
"It's the only one he's got." 
"Dear sir, please take it off." 
"It gives me the eye- ache, sir." 
220 



OXFORD 

"Have you paid for it yet?" 

"Was there anybody in the shop when you 
bought it?" 

"Are you wearing it for an advertisement ? " 

"Hush-h! She gave it to him." 

"Oh, SHE put it on for him." 

"You're quite right, sir. Don't take it 
off." 

"We can sympathize with young romance, 
sir." 

"Be careful of it, sir." 

"Wear it till your dying day." 

"It's the colour of her hair." 

But by this time the poor fellow's face was 
flaming, and he jerked off the tie and flung 
it to the floor amid thunders of derisive 
applause. 

Then the Undergraduate Gallery turned 
its attention to the organist, who in all the 
hubbub was brilliantly going through the 
numbers of his program. 

"Will you kindly tell us what you're play- 
ing, Mr. Lloyd?" 

"We don't care for classical music our- 
selves." 

"'Auld Lang Syne,' if you please." 

The organ struck into " Auld Lang Syne," 
221 



OXFORD 

and the lads sprang up and sang it lustily with 
hands clasped in the approved Scotch fashion. 
'"Rule, Britannia,' Mr. Lloyd." 
Again he obliged them and was rewarded 
by a rousing cheer, followed by cheers for the 
Varsity and the ladies, groans for the Proctors, 
who are the officers of discipline, and barks 
for their assistants, the so-called Bulldogs. 
In the midst of this yelping chorus the great 
doors were flung wide, and an awesome file 
of dignitaries, in all the blues and purples, 
pinks and scarlets, of their various degrees, 
paced slowly up the aisle, escorting their dis- 
tinguished guests, savants of several nations, 
and headed by the Vice- Chancellor, whose 
array outwent Solomon in all his glory. 

The top gallery was on its feet, but not in 
reverence. The organ-march was drowned 
in the roar of lusty voices greeting the Head 
of the University thus : 

"Oh, whist, whist, whist! 

Here comes the bogie man. 
Now go to bed, you Baby, 

You Tommy, Nell, and Dan. 
Oh, whist, whist, whist! 

He'll catch ye if he can; 
And all the popsies, wopsies, wop, 
Run for the bogie man." 
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OXFORD 

The uproar was no whit diminished when 
presently the Vice- Chancellor was seen to be 
making an address. 

"Who wrote it for you, sir?" 

"Oh, that's shocking bad Latin." 

"Jam! What kind of jam?" 

"It's just what you said to those other 
blokes last year." 

"It's always the same thing." 

"It's all blarney." 

"The guests wish you were done, sir." 

"You may sit down, sir." 

But the Vice- Chancellor, unperturbed, kept 
on with his inaudible oratory to its natural 
end. 

A professor of illustrious name was next 
to rise, throwing up a laughing look at the 
boys, whose tumult bore him down after the 
first few sentences. What matter? It was 
idle to pretend that that great audience could 
follow Latin speeches. They were all to go 
into print, and he who would and could might 
read them at his ease. The phrase that un- 
did this genial personage was clarior luce. 

"Oh, oh, sir! Lucy who?" 

" Clare or Lucy ? Try for both, sir." 

"We'll surely tell your wife, sir." 
223 



OXFORD 

"A sad example to our youth, sir." 

"You shock our guest from Paris, sir." 

The prize English essayist was hardly 
allowed to recite the first paragraph of his 
production. 

"Very nice." 

"But a great bore." 

"It's not as good as mine." 

"That'll do, sir." 

"The Vice- Chancellor is gaping, sir." 

"Three cheers for the lady who jilted the 
Senior Proctor!" 

Under the storm of enthusiasm evoked by 
this happy suggestion, the English essayist 
gave place to the Greek poet, a rosy- cheeked 
stripling who stood his ground barely two 
minutes. 

"Aren't you very young, my dear?" 

"Will some kind lady kiss him for his 
mother?" 

The English prize poem, the Newdigate, 
founded by Sir Roger Newdigate of the 
George Eliot country, was heard through 
with a traditional attention and respect, 
though the poet's delivery came in for occa- 
sional criticism. 

"You're too singsong, sir." 
224 



OXFORD 

"Please give him the key, Mr. Lloyd." 

Even those few world-famed scholars and 
statesmen on whom the University was con- 
ferring the high distinction of her D. C. L. 
were showered with merry impudence, as one 
by one they advanced to receive the honour, 
though there were no such lucky shots of wit 
as have signalised, on different occasions, at 
Oxford or at Cambridge, the greeting of cer- 
tain popular poets. Holmes was asked from 
the gallery if he had come in the one-hoss shay, 
and Longfellow, wearing the gorgeous vest- 
ments of his new dignity, was hailed by a cry : 
"Behold the Red Man of the West." Even 
the Laureate, whose prophet locks were flung 
back from his inspired brow somewhat more 
wildly than their wont, was assailed by a 
stentorian inquiry: 

"Did your mother call you early, call you 
early, Alfred dear?" 

The conferring of degrees upon Oxford 
students takes place — at irregular intervals, 
but not infrequently — in the Convocation 
House. Into a long, narrow room, digni- 
taries grouped at the top and candidates at 
the bottom, with guests seated in rows on 
either side, sweeps the Vice- Chancellor in his 
15 225 



OXFORD 

gorgeous red and white. He is preceded by 
the mace-bearer and followed by two Proctors. 
Taking the place of honour, he reads a page 
or two of Latin, lifting his cap — the Proctors 
raising theirs in solemn unison — whenever 
the word Dominus occurs. The lists of can- 
didates for the various degrees are then read, 
and the Proctors, at the end of each list, rise 
simultaneously, march a few steps down the 
hall, wheel with military precision, and, like 
the King of France, march back again. These 
apparently wayward promenades are sup- 
posed to give opportunity for tradesmen with 
unpaid bills to imperil a candidate's degree 
by plucking the Proctor's gown. The Ox- 
ford tradesmen have not availed themselves 
of this privilege for a century or so, but the 
term plucked is only too familiar. With many 
bows and much Latin, even with kneeling that 
the Vice- Chancellor may tap the learned pates 
with a Testament, the higher degrees are con- 
ferred. Each brand-new doctor withdraws 
into the robing-room, where his waiting friends 
eagerly divest him of his old plumage and 
trick him out in gayer hood and more volumi- 
nous gown. So arrayed, he returns for a low 
bow to the Vice- Chancellor, who touches his 

226 



OXFORD 

own mortar-board in response. The larger 
company of candidates for the first degree 
come forward in groups, each head of a col- 
lege presenting his own men, and these are 
speedily made into bachelors. 

Out of that student multitude have come 

— not all, be it confessed, with degrees — 
many of England's greatest. Glorious phan- 
toms haunt by moonlight the Gothic shadows 
of High Street. The gallant Lovelace, the 
resolute Pym, Admiral Blake, Sir Philip Sid- 
ney, Francis Beaumont, Lord Herbert of 
Cherbury, Sir Thomas Browne, Dr. Johnson, 
Dean Swift, Wellington, Peel, Gladstone, 
Adam Smith, Hamilton, Locke, Hobbes, 
Blackstone, Newman, Manning, Stanley, 
Maurice, Faber, Heber, Clough, Jeremy 
Taylor, Whitfield, the Wesleys, the Arnolds, 

— and this is but the beginning of a tale that 
can never be told. Yet Oxford, "Adorable 
Dreamer" though she be, 

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope," 

has not done as well by her poets as by the 
rest of her brood. With all her theology, 
she did not make a churchman out of Swin- 
burne, nor a saint of Herrick, and as for 

227 



OXFORD 

Landor and Shelley, her eyes were holden 
and she cast them forth. 

Of Shakespeare, an alien figure crossing 
the path of her gowned and hooded doctors, 
or watching her "young barbarians all at 
play" — for Oxford lads knew how to play 
before ever "Eights Week" was thought 
of — she seems to have remembered nothing 
save that he stood godfather to his landlady's 
baby-boy, little William Davenant, in the old 
Saxon church of St. Michael's. Oxford let 
him pay his reckoning at the Crown and go 
his way unnoted. He was none of hers. 
Even now, when his name is blazoned on 
rows upon rows of volumes in window after 
window of Broad Street, I doubt if the Ox- 
ford dons would deem Shakespeare capable 
of editing his own works. 

"Where were you bred? 
And how achieved you these endowments, which 
You make more rich to owe?" 

One would like to fancy that Duke Hum- 
phrey's library, beautiful as a library of 
Paradise, made the poet welcome; but the 
King's Commissioners had despoiled it in 
1550, and more than half a century went by 

228 



OXFORD 

before, toward the close of Shakespeare's 
life, Sir Thomas Bodley had refounded and 
refitted it as The Bodleian. 

Yet the grey university city, "spreading 
her gardens to the moonlight, and whisper- 
ing from her towers the last enchantments 
of the Middle Age," — how could she have 
failed deeply to impress the sensitive spirit 
of that disregarded wayfarer ? Although she 
had suffered so grievously under the flail 
of the Reformation, although she was des- 
tined to become the battered stronghold of 
Charles I, the voice within her gates was, 
and is, not the battle-cry, but the murmurous 
voice of meditation and dream and prayer. 
As we enter into the sanctuary of her grave 
beauty, personal chagrins and the despair 
of our own brief mortality fall away. The 
unending life of human thought is here, 
enduring, achieving, advancing, with its con- 
stant miracle of resurrection out of the old 
form into the new. 



229 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN 
VALLEY 

OF the counties occupying the Severn 
basin, three form, in continuation 
with Cheshire, the Welsh border, — 
Shropshire, Hereford, and Monmouth. Shrop- 
shire, together with the West Midland counties 
of Worcester and Gloucester, is traversed by 
the mother stream, but Hereford and Mon- 
mouth lie in their respective vales of the tribu- 
tary Wye and Usk, and Warwickshire, already 
noted, in the broad basin of the Avon. 

In previous summers we had explored, to 
some extent, Gloucestershire and Worcester- 
shire and the picturesque Wye valley, but 
we were, except for glimpses from the rail- 
way, strangers to Shropshire, and so dropped 
off the train at Shrewsbury, in a Saturday 
twilight, with but moderate expectation. 
Had not the judicious Baedeker instructed 
us that "not more than half a day need be 
devoted to Shrewsbury"? WTiat happened 
was that we lost our hearts to the beautiful 

230 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

old town and lingered there nearly a week 
without finding time, even so, to do a third 
of the tourist duty laid down in what a guile- 
less Florentine has called "the red prayer- 
book of the foreigners." But we would 
gladly have stayed months longer and listened 
for the moonlight talk between that lofty 
Norman castle, "builte in such a brave 
plot that it could have espyed a byrd flying 
in every strete," and those fine old houses of 
the Salop black-and-white whose "curious 
sculptures and carvings and quirks of archi- 
tecture" gave such pleasure to Hawthorne. 
Surely here, in this city of many memories, 
"a stone shall cry out of the wall, and the 
beam out of the timber shall answer it." 

Shrewsbury is but a little city, — one of the 
local proverbs runs : "We don't go by size, or 
a cow would catch a hare, " — but its architec- 
tural grace and a certain joyousness of open- 
air life more French than English endow it 
with rare charm. It won a fitting praise from 
its own Tudor poet, Thomas Churchyard : 

"Now Shrewsbury shall be honoured (as it ought); 
The seate deserves a righte greate honour heere; 
That walled town is sure so finely wrought, 
It glads itself, and beautifies the sheere." 
231 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

Fortunate in situation, Shrewsbury is en- 
throned upon twin hills almost surrounded 
by the Severn. As one of the warders of the 
Welsh border, it was stoutly fortified, and 
enough of the old wall remains to make a 
pleasant promenade. On the only land ap- 
proach, an isthmus barely three hundred 
yards broad, stands the square red keep of 
the castle. The slender spire of St. Mary's 
is a landmark far and wide. St. Alkmund's, 
with a sister spire, has a tradition that 
reaches back to /Ethelfreda, daughter of 
Alfred the Great. Old St. Chad's, a noble 
church in the days of Henry III, has swayed 
and sunk into a fragment that serves as 
chapel for the cemetery where some of the 
first Salopian families take their select repose. 
The towered Abbey Church is of venerable 
dignity, with battered monuments of cross- 
legged knight and chaliced priest, and a 
meek, bruised, broken effigy supposed to 
represent that fiery founder of the abbey, 
first Earl of Shrewsbury and builder of 
the castle, Roger de Montgomery, second 
in command at Hastings to William the 
Conqueror. 

The first known name of Shrewsbury was 
232 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

The Delight, and by that name it may well 
be remembered of those who have wandered 
through Wyle Cop and Butchers' Row, past 
the Raven tavern where Farquhar wrote 
''The Recruiting Officer" and the old half- 
timbered house where Richmond, soon to 
be Henry VII, lodged on his way to Bosworth 
Field. There are steep streets that, as the 
proverb has it, go "uphill and against the 
heart," but carven gables and armorial bear- 
ings and mediaeval barge- boards tempt one 
on. There are wild and fierce associations, 
as that of the Butter Market, where at the 
High Cross poor Prince David of Wales — 
who must have had nine lives — after being 
dragged through the town at a horse's tail, 
was "hanged, burned and quartered," but 
in the main it is a city of gracious memories. 
Its Grammar School, an Edward VI founda- 
tion, which in the seventeenth century boasted 
four masters, six hundred scholars, and a 
"hansome library," counts on its roll of 
alumni Charles Darwin, the most famous 
native of Shrewsbury, the poet Faber, Philip 
Sidney and his fidus Achates, Fulke Greville, 
whose tomb in St. Mary's Church at War- 
wick bears the inscription that he was "Ser- 

233 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

vant to Queen Elizabeth, Counsellour to 
King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sid- 
ney." It was in 1564, that starry year in 
English literary annals, that the two lads 
entered the school. Sidney's father was then 
Lord President of Wales — one of the best 
she ever had — and resident at Ludlow 
Castle, from whose splendid halls Sir Henry 
and Lady Mary wrote most wise and tender 
letters to their "little Philip." He must 
have profited by these, for in after years 
Fulke Greville extolled him as the paragon 
of schoolboys: 

"Of his youth I will report no other wonder than 
this, though I lived with him and knew him from a 
child, yet I never knew him other than a man, with 
such staidness of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, 
as carried grace and reverence above great years ; his 
talk ever of knowledge and his very play tending to 
enrich his mind so that even his teachers found 
something in him to observe and learn above that 
which they had usually read or taught." 

The school, still flourishing, is now housed 
in new buildings across the Severn, opposite 
the Quarry, a spacious park with 

" Broad ambrosial aisles of lofty limes." 
234 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

Here we used to sit on shaded benches and 
watch the bright- eyed urchins fishing in the 
river, for Shropshire, as the saying goes, is 
"full of trouts and tories." Here we would 
repeat Milton's invocation to the Goddess of 
the Severn: 

"Sabrina fair, 

Listen where thou art sitting 
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, 

In twisted braids of lilies knitting 
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair," 

and when her ""sliding chariot" declined to 
stay for us 

"By the rushy-fringed bank," 

we would ignobly console ourselves with "a 
Shrewsbury cake of Palin's own make," — 
such a delicious, melting- on- the- tongue con- 
coction as Queen Bess was regaled withal and 
as suggested to Congreve, in his "Way of the 
World," the retort: "Why, brother Wilful of 
Salop, you may be as short as a Shrewsbury 
cake, if you please." The Simnel cake of 
which Herrick sings, — 

"I'll to thee a Simnel bring, 
'Gainst thou goest a mothering," 
235 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

is made only in the days approaching Christ- 
mas and Easter. It consists of minced fruit 
in a saffron- coloured crust, said to be exceed- 
ing tough, and on Mothering Sunday, in Mid- 
Lent, is taken as a gift to their mothers by 
children out at service, who, on this local 
festival, come home to be welcomed at the 
cost of the fatted calf, veal and rice- pudding 
being the regulation dinner. The ancient 
refrain: " A soule-cake, a soule-cake! Have 
mercy on all Christen soules for a soule- 
cake!" refers to yet another specialty of 
Shropshire ovens. On All Souls' Eve it used 
to be the custom to set out on the table a tower 
of these round flat cakes, every visitor re- 
ducing the pile by one. The residue, if resi- 
due there were, fell to the share of the poor 
ghosts. 

The Quarry, in the bad old times, was often 
the scene of bull- baitings and bear-baitings 
and cock-fights. It is better to remember 
that the Whitsun Plays were performed here, 
for these were comely and edifying spectacles. 
In 1568, when Sir Henry Sidney favoured the 
Grammar School with a visit, there was "a 
noble stage playe played at Shrewsbury, the 
which was praysed greately, and the chyffe 

236 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

actor thereof was one Master Aston," being 
no less a personage than the head master. 

A Quarry holiday that, by the grace of 
Sabrina, fell within the brief limits of our 
sojourn, was the Shrewsbury Floral Fete, 
vaunted on the pink program as "The Grand- 
est Fete in the United Kingdom." Our land- 
lady earnestly vouched for the truth of this 
description. "There is them who would have 
it as York Gala be the greatest, but York 
Gala, grand however, ben't so grand as 
this." 

On Wednesday, August twenty- second, we 
took aristocratic tickets at two and six, for 
Wednesday is the day of the county families. 
Thursday is the shilling day, when, by train, 
by coach, by barge, by wagonette, by farmer's 
gig and carrier's cart, all the countryside 
comes streaming in. The weather had been 
watched with keen anxiety. "Rain spells 
ruin," the saying went ; but it was clear and 
hot. Men, women, and children lay on the 
grass around their luncheon baskets — we 
had hardly expected this of the county fami- 
lies — all through the wide enclosure, mak- 
ing the most of every disk of shade. From 
the central bandstand and from the encircling 

237 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

tents — refreshment tents, flower tents, fruit 
tents, vegetable tents, bee- and-honey tents — 
drooped rows of languid pennons. The foun- 
tain in The Dingle sent up a silvery tree of 
spray, while the white and yellow water-lilies 
in its little pool blinked like sleepy children. 
Within the tents the heat was stifling, but a 
continuous flow of flushed humanity, as whist 
as in the County Store where even the awed 
shop girls are instructed to speak with bated 
breath, passed in admiring review the sumptu- 
ous masses of heavily fragrant flowers, the 
great black grapes almost bursting with wine, 
the luscious plums and cherries, the amazing 
platoons of plethoric onions, exaggerated po- 
tatoes, and preposterously elongated turnips 
and carrots, the model beehives and the jars 
of amber honey. The gold-medal exhibitors, 
perspiring but beaming, stood by their red- 
ticketed products, while the silver- medal folk 
viewed their blue tickets with a pleasant sense 
of superiority to the subdued white- ticket bat- 
talion and the invisible yellow- ticketers who 
were only " commended. " 

All the while successive bands — the Shrop- 
shire Imperial Yeomanry, His Majesty's 
Coldstream Guards, and His Majesty's Scots 

238 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

Guards — were merrily playing away, and 
presently the clamorous ringing of what might 
have been a sturdy dinner-bell called us to the 
Acrobatic Stand, about which the crowd soon 
became so dense, while the somersault artists 
converted their bodies into giddy playthings, 
that one rustic philosopher was heard to re- 
mark: "Well, we ain't seeing owt, but we're 
in t' show." Then came the horse-leaping, 
which was such a favourite feature that not 
even the miraculous performances of the 
King of the High Wire, and the ether- dancing 
feats of the Cee Mee Troupe availed to divide 
the multitude. When Rufus, to the deep but 
decorous delight of the Cheshire visitors, had 
outleaped all the rest, we swarmed across the 
Quarry and sat down on the grass to wait for 
the ascent of the monster balloons, those 
gigantic golden- brown puffs of gas that had 
been softly tugging at their bonds all the 
morning. The Shrewsbury had already 
made a number of captive ascents and finally 
achieved its "right away" in good order, ris- 
ing majestically into the upper air until it 
hung like an orange on our furthest reach of 
vision, but the wayward Wulfruna broke her 
ropes on a captive trip and feloniously made 

239 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

off with several astonished passengers, among 
whose vanishing heads peered out the scared, 
ecstatic face of a small boy. 

As dusk grew on, our ever-greatening host 
still comported itself with well-bred English 
quietude. We never forgot what was due 
to the presence of the county families. Even 
the lads in Eton jackets tripped one another 
up softly and engagingly. Bath chairs and 
baby wagons traversed the thick of the press. 
The King of the High Wire, who seemed to 
be made of air and india-rubber, appeared 
again and performed such impossible antics 
on his dizzy line that the setting sun rested its 
chin on the horizon to stare at him, and from 
a slit in the gaudy trapeze tent half- chalked 
visages peered out and paid him the pro- 
fessional tribute of envy. The tumblers 
tumbled more incredibly than before. The 
Handcuff King shuffled off one mortal coil 
after another. The Lady Cyclists cycled in 
an extremely unladylike manner, — a per- 
formance punctuated by the impatient yelp- 
ing of little dogs beneath the stage, eager 
to show off their own accomplishments. 
On they came at last, bounding, barking, 
wagging, tumultuous, all striving to take 

240 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

part in every trick. They quite refused 
to stop when their respective turns were 
over, but went on all together excitedly 
jumping rope and hitting ball long after 
ropes and balls had disappeared, until they 
were unceremoniously picked up and bun- 
dled down a trap- door, an exit of wagging 
tail- tips. 

As darkness fell, the Severn was all astir 
with pleasure-boats, while happy ragamuffins, 
getting their fireworks for nothing, thronged 
the further bank. Rockets went skittering 
over our heads, fire- wheels spluttered and 
whizzed, and as the first of the fire-balloons 
flashed up, a baby voice behind us piped : 

"O mummy, mummy! See! There's 
a somebody died and going up to heaven." 

Altogether the Floral Fete was as sweet- 
natured and pleasurable a festival as ever we 
chanced upon and completed our subjuga- 
tion to this old town that the Severn so 
lovingly embraces. To quote from a black- 
letter ballad treasured in the Bodleian: 

"The merry Town of Shrewsbury 
God bless it still, 
For it stands most gallantly 
Upon a high hill. 
16 241 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

It standeth most bravely 

For all men to see. 
Then every man to his mind, 

Shrewsbury for me!" 

The county of Shropshire smooths away 
on the east into a level pasture- land belonging 
to the central plain of England, but its western 
portion is roughened by the spurs of the Welsh 
mountains. Its own mountain is the Wrekin, 
a solitary height a few miles to the east of 
Shrewsbury. The summit commands so 
wide a view that the toast of Salopians every- 
where is "All round the Wrekin." South of 
the Severn run several ranges of hills down 
toward the hop-gardens and apple- orchards 
of Hereford and Worcester. Of these, "Clee 
Hills," the highest of the ranges, "be holy in 
Shropshire." * North Salop has a coal-field, 
with its accompanying prosperity and dis- 
figurement, — busy factories, belching fur- 
naces, houses that tip and tumble from the 
hollowing out of the ground beneath. We 
rioted in our memorable motor car through 
several of these grimy towns, Wellington 
among them, and Newport, where the run- 
away Shrewsbury balloon came safely down. 

1 Leland. 

242 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

Wellington cherishes a legend relating to a 
bad old giant of Wales, who, having a spite 
against the Mayor of Shrewsbury, purposed to 
choke up the Severn and drown out the town. 
So he started off with a heavy sack of earth 
over his shoulder, but lost his way, like the 
stupid giant he was, and met, near Welling- 
ton, a cobbler carrying home a bag of boots 
and shoes to mend. The giant asked him 
how far it was to Shrewsbury, and the cobbler, 
emptying his sack of ragged footwear, de- 
clared he had worn out all those boots and 
shoes on the road. This so discouraged the 
giant that he flung down his burden of earth, 
forming the Wrekin, and trudged meekly 
home again. 

Far more delightful than automobiling 
were the leisurely drives we took in the neigh- 
bourhood of Shrewsbury. One fair after- 
noon we drove five miles southeast to 
Wroxeter to view the tragic ruins of the Ro- 
man city of Uriconium. Here, at the junc- 
tion of Watling Street with the western 
Roman road, guarding these communications 
and the passes of the Severn, stood "The 
White Town in the Woodland." After the Ro- 
man armies were withdrawn, it was stormed 

243 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

and burned by the Saxons. The lapse of 
fourteen hundred years has not obliterated 
the traces of that anguish. Only a little be- 
low the surface lies earth still black from 
the heats of the tremendous conflagration; 
charred bones crackle beneath the tread ; in 
an under- chamber of one of the baths has 
been found the skeleton of an old man 
crouched between the pillars, as if seeking 
refuge from the rage of fire and sword. The 
skeletons of two women were beside him and, 
close to his bony hand, his little hoard of 
coins. There still stands a rugged mass of 
wall some seventy feet in length, its Roman 
string-courses of flat red bricks showing 
bright against the prevailing grey of that 
jagged, gaping structure. Now birds nest in 
it, and from the lower heaps and ranges of 
broken masonry all about springs the wild 
rose as well as the thistle. Uriconium was 
larger than Pompeii, and its ruins, said to 
be the most extensive of their kind in 
England, smite one with heartache. We 
roamed about its grassy hollows and thicketed 
mounds, its bone-strewn forum, and its baths 
with their patches of mosaic flooring, their 
groups of little brick columns, and other 

244 






COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

fragments of a perished luxury. We won- 
dered that the sky above this city left so 
desolate, a sky of softest azure flecked with 
cloudlets dazzling white, did not wear per- 
petual shadow for its sake. But those 
heavens were as serene as if the dying wail 
of Uriconium had never pierced them, and 
the cleft summit of Milton's "blue- topped 
Wrekin " — a deep, intense, gleaming blue 
it was that afternoon — kept no memory of 
the day when the Severn ran red with blood 
and its own head was veiled with smoke and 
ashes. 

The noble Norman church of Wroxeter, 
near by, has set at its churchyard gate two 
Roman pillars with finely sculptured capitals 
that have been recovered from the river-bed. 
Its font is hollowed out of another Roman 
capital and looks only half converted. The 
church is remarkable for its Easter sepulchre, 
an arched niche in the north wall of the chan- 
cel, and for its altar- tombs. This Easter 
sepulchre, where the crucifix would have been 
placed on Good Friday to be raised again 
with rejoicing on Easter morning, is of creamy 
stone with ball- flower ornament. Within the 
niche are reddish traces of a Resurrection 

245 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

fresco. The effigies on the altar- tombs have 
been singularly preserved from mutilation. 
Even the rings upon those comely hands that 
clasp their prayer-books in the centuried 
trance of their devotions remain intact. Here 
sleeps a Jacobean baronet splendid in scarlet 
alabaster robes and broad gilt chain. A pea- 
cock is at his head and a lion's claw at his 
feet. His lady, from gold head-dress to 
dainty shoon, is no less immaculate. May 
their rest on their stone pillows be forever un- 
profaned! In that hushed and almost for- 
gotten sanctuary slumber also Elizabethan 
knights and ladies whose tombs, wrought 
about with quaint figures, are peculiarly in- 
dividual and tempted us to closer study than 
the waning light allowed. 

There were many pilgrimages we longed 
to make in Shropshire — to the birthplace and 
burial-place of Lord Clive, her Indian hero, 
and to the home of Lord Herbert of Chirbury, 
brother of the Saintly George Herbert, himself 
a Jacobean courtier only less eminent in letters 
than in life. Even bluff Ben Jonson hailed 
him as " All- virtuous Herbert." Other Shrop- 
shire worthies, who would hardly so have 
designated each other, are Richard Baxter 

246 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

and William Wycherley. Two others that I 
would like, in the interests of a broader 
charity, to pair together in the procession 
of great Salopian ghosts, are Bishop Percy of 
the "Reliques," and Dick Tarlton, lord of 
mirth, the best-beloved clown of the Eliza- 
bethan stage. The queen herself had a 
good friend in Dick Tarlton, for he told her, 
says Fuller, "more of her faults than most 
of her chaplains and cured her melancholy 
better than all her physicians." 

The inexorable almanac urged us on, but 
one excursion that we could not forego was 
that to Battlefield Church. Thither we drove 
through such a tender afternoon, the soft sky 
brooding close above the earth as if she loved 
it, that it was hard to realise associations of 
wrath and war. The sun made golden 
windows in the clouds. The brown Severn 
was slyly breaking down its banks as it ran. 
We took our way through Shropshire lanes 
whose hawthorn hedges on either side were 
fringed with yellow wisps of rye scraped off 
from the harvest loads. Beyond we came 
upon the harvest fields with their shining 
stacks. And in Battlefield Church itself we 
found, almost rough-hewn from the tree- 

247 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

trunk, a mediaeval image of Our Lady of 
Pity. 

Here was fought on another summer day, 
July 21, 1403, the decisive battle between 
Henry IV and the Percies. Henry had sat 
but four years upon his troubled throne when 
these proud nobles of the north, by whose aid 
he had ousted Richard II, rose against him. 
Although Richard had been murdered, Ed- 
mund Mortimer, the next of blood, was a 
thorn in Henry's pillow. Mortimer had been 
taken prisoner by the revolting Welsh leader, 
Owen Glendower, and Henry, if we may take 
Shakespeare for our historian, listened coldly 
and incredulously to Harry Percy's assur- 
ances of Mortimer's resistance. In vain did 
this eloquent Hotspur, Mortimer's brother- 
in-law, pour forth his impetuous tale — how 

"on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank, 
In single opposition, hand to hand, 
He did confound the best part of an hour 
In changing hardiment with great Glendower; 
Three times they breath 'd, and three times did they drink, 
Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood; 
Who then, affrighted with their bloody looks, 
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds, 
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank 
Blood-stained with those valiant combatants." 

248 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

When the king refused to ransom Mor- 
timer, Hotspur's anger bubbled over: 

"He said he would not ransom Mortimer, 
Forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer, 
But I will find him when he lies asleep, 
And in his ear I'll holla 'Mortimer!' 
Nay, 

I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak 
Nothing but 'Mortimer' and give it him." 

Thus Hotspur, and his father, the Earl of 
Northumberland, his uncle, the Earl of Wor- 
cester, "the irregular and wild Glendower,' , 
and the valiant Douglas of Scotland raised 
their united banners against the usurper. 
Many Cheshire gentlemen, to their sorrow, 
joined Hotspur as he marched through their 
county. He came in sight of Shrewsbury on 
the evening of July nineteenth. But Henry was 
there before him ; the royal standard floated 
over the castle ; and it was three or four miles to 
the north of the town that the shock of battle 
came. Five thousand of the rebels and three 
thousand of the loyal forces fell. The Earl 
of Worcester was slain on the field, and "that 
spirit Percy" himself, "the theme of honour's 
tongue," he who had ever been "sweet for- 
tune's minion and her pride," perished there 

249 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

in the toils of his "ill-weav'd ambition." 
The traditional spot where he fell is pointed 
out, as also the antique oak from whose 
leafy top Owen Glendower is fabled to have 
watched, at a safe distance, the fortunes of the 
fight. 

Battlefield Church was built in gratitude 
for this victory, and a perpetual chantry of 
eight canons was endowed to serve it with 
daily masses "for the king's salvation during 
his life, and after his death for his soul, and 
for the souls of his progenitors and of those 
who were slain in the battle and were there 
buried, and for the souls of all the faithful 
departed." The meadow behind the church, 
which, with its mounds, ridges, and depres- 
sions, still bears the battle-scars, is supposed 
to be the grave of thousands of the soldiers. 
The masses were duly said for nearly one 
hundred and fifty years, until the chantry was 
surrendered to Henry VIII. The church, 
abandoned after the Dissolution and suffered 
to fall into decay, has been restored. Its 
curious image of Our Lady of Pity was 
an ancient treasure of Albright Hussey, a 
neighbouring hamlet where we paused on 
our homeward way to see a veritable 

250 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

moated grange, and was brought to Battle- 
field early in the fifteenth century, when the 
church was consecrated. In the vestry are two 
small windows that keep such bits of the 
original glass as could be gathered up from 
the pile of shreds and splinters stored away 
in a farm- building close by. One of the 
recovered designs is a figure of Saint Eliz- 
abeth of Hungary, vivid, ascetic, with loaf 
in hand. But more vital yet is the portrait 
of Henry IV — a royal form robed in such 
glowing, living crimson as only the old crafts- 
men knew how to pour into their glass. 
The face, "wan with care," is earnest and 
sorrowful. 

Many are the battle- tales of these counties 
on the Welsh marches. William the Con- 
queror gave leave to certain of his followers 
to take and hold what land they could in that 
wild region, and a line of strong castles was 
erected ; but the fierce British, making sudden 
raids from their mountain fastnesses, were a 
constant threat and trouble, until Edward I, 
despite the tuneful curses of all the Welsh 
bards, reduced them to subjection, putting 
the last native Prince of Wales to a cruel 
death at Shrewsbury and transferring the 

251 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

title to his own firstborn son. As the juris- 
diction of the Marches became of importance, 
special courts were held by the Prince of 
Wales either in person or through a deputy 
known as the Lord President of Wales, — an 
office not abolished until 1688. The seat of 
these courts was Ludlow, a place that even 
to our partial eyes rivalled Shrewsbury in 
beauty and is counted by many the banner 
town of England. It stands in the very 
south of Shropshire on a commanding height 
just where the river Teme, which forms the 
Hereford boundary, is joined by the Corve. 
The lofty- towered Church of St. Lawrence, 
only second in praise to St. Mary Redcliffe 
of Bristol, and the impressive remains of 
what was once both Castle and Princely 
Palace crown this precipitous mass of 
rock, from which broad streets, retain- 
ing a goodly number of stately timbered 
houses dating from the times when the 
Courts of the Marches gathered illustrious 
companies at Ludlow, descend to plain and 
river. No description of this once royal 
residence, with its pure, bracing atmos- 
phere, can better the honest lines of old 
Tom Churchyard: 

252 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

"The towne doth stand most part upon a hill, 

Built well and fayre, with streates both longe and wide; 
The houses such, where straungers lodge at will, 

As long as there the Counsell lists abide. 
"Both fine and cleane the streates are all throughout, 

With condits cleere and wholesome water springs; 
And who that lists to walk the towne about 

Shall find therein some rare and pleasant things; 
But chiefly there the ayre so sweete you have 

As in no place ye can no better crave." 

The magnificent old castle has seen strange 
sights. While undergoing siege by Stephen, in 
his war against Maud, Prince Henry of Scot- 
land, who accompanied him, was caught up by 
a long iron hook and all but pulled within 
the walls. Stephen himself galloped up just 
in time to cut the cords with his sword and 
rescue the dangling prince. The redoubtable 
Sir Hugh de Mortimer, Lord of Wigmore, 
once lay captive in what is still known as 
Mortimer's Tower. It cost him three thou- 
sand marks of silver, besides all his plate, 
horses, and hawks, to go free again. Ludlow 
Castle was, at a later period, added by mar- 
riage to the already formidable holdings of 
the Mortimers. Roger de Mortimer took an 
active part in the deposition of Edward II and 
was created Earl of March. In imitation of 

253 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

King Arthur, whose great tradition arches 
over all that countryside, the ambitious young 
noble held a Round Table, and conducted 
Queen Isabella, with whom his relations were 
not above suspicion, and his boy sovereign, 
Edward III, to his castles of Wigmore and 
Ludlow, where he entertained them with 
" great costs in tilts and other pastimes." 
There was not room in England for him and 
for a king, and his arrogant career was ended 
on the Smithfield gibbet. Marlowe gives him 
a proud exit from the tragic stage : 

"Weep not for Mortimer 
That scorns the world and, as a traveler, 
Goes to discover countries yet unknown." 

It was his great-grandson, Edmund de 
Mortimer, who, by marriage with the daughter 
of Prince Lionel, third son of Edward III, 
gave that other Edmund Mortimer, his de- 
scendant, a better title to the throne than that 
of Henry IV. This last of the Mortimers was 
until his death the apparently listless centre 
of continual conspiracies. When he gave up 
his ineffectual ghost, his estates passed to his 
nephew, the vigorous Duke of York, who 
fixed his chief residence at Ludlow Castle. 
As the York rebellion gathered force and the 

254 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

Wars of the Roses set in, this neighbourhood 
became a centre of hostilities. The Lancas- 
trians, in their hour of triumph, wreaked 
furious vengeance on Ludlow, but Edward 
IV, on his accession, consoled the town with 
a liberal charter and selected it as the resi- 
dence of his sons, the Little Princes of the 
Tower. It is pleasant to think that before 
their swift fate came upon them they had a 
few years of happy childhood playing on the 
greeflsward of those spacious courts, perched 
up with their lesson books in the stone win- 
dow-seats, and praying their innocent prayers 
within the arcaded walls of that circular Nor- 
man chapel, built on the model of the Church 
of the Holy Sepulchre and praised by Church- 
yard as 

"So bravely wrought, so fayre and finely fram'd, 
That to world's end the beauty may endure." 

Another princely association, hardly less pa- 
thetic, haunts these arched portals and embat- 
tled towers. The heir of Henry VII, Prince 
Arthur, in whom the greatness of Britain's 
legendary hero was to live again, passed his 
delicate childhood here, and here, shortly 
after his marriage to Catherine of Arragon, 

255 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

died suddenly on a spring day of 1502, a lad 
of sixteen summers. An unknown contem- 
porary tells how letters were hastily de- 
spatched from Ludlow to His Majesty's 
Council, and they, seeking the gentlest bearer 
of such grievous news, "sent for the King's 
ghostly father. . . . He in the morning of the 
Tuesday following, somewhat before the time 
accustomed, knocked at the King's chamber 
door; and when the King understood it was 
his Confessor, he commanded to let him in. 
The Confessor then commanded all those 
there present to avoid, and after due saluta- 
tion began to say, Si bona de manu Dei sus- 
cepimus, mala autem quare non sustineamus? 
and so showed his Grace that his dearest son 
was departed to God. When his Grace un- 
derstood that sorrowful heavy tidings, he sent 
for the Queen, saying that he and his Queen 
would take the painful sorrows together. 
After that she was come, and saw the King 
her lord and that natural and painful sorrow, 
as I have heard say, she with full great and 
constant comfortable words besought his 
Grace that he would, first after God, re- 
member the weal of his own noble person, 
the comfort of his realm and of her . . . over 

256 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

that how that God had left him yet a fair 
prince, two fair princesses; and that God is 
where he was. . . . Then the King thanked 
her of her good comfort. After that she was 
departed and come to her own chamber, 
natural and motherly remembrance of that 
great loss smote her so sorrowful to the heart, 
that those that were about her were fain to 
send for the King to comfort her." 

We saw on a Sunday, in the beautiful 
Church of St. Lawrence, a dole of bread for 
the poor, a row of twelve goodly loaves set out 
on a Tudor monument which is believed to 
commemorate Prince Arthur, and possibly 
to cover the ashes of his boyish heart, al- 
though the body was buried in Worcester 
Cathedral, where his chantry stands at the 
right of the High Altar. 

Among the tombs in the rich- windowed 
choir is one whose inscription reads : 

"Heare lyethe the bodye of Ambrozia Sydney, iiii 
doughter of the Right Honourable Syr Henry Sydney, 
Knight of the moste noble order of the Garter, Lord 
President of the Counsell of Wales, etc. And of Lady 
Mary his wyef , doughter of the famous Duke of North- 
umberland, who dyed in Ludlow Castell, ye 22nd of 
Februarie, 1574." 

17 257 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

We paused there a moment in reverence to 
Sir Philip Sidney's mother, "a full fair lady" 
who lost her beauty by nursing Queen Eliza- 
beth, from whom she took the contagion, 
through an attack of smallpox, and afterwards 
" chose rather to hide herself from the curious 
eyes of a delicate time than come upon the 
stage of the world with any manner of dis- 
paragement." 

The last Lord Marcher before the Restora- 
tion was the Earl of Bridgwater, whose ap- 
pointment was most gloriously celebrated by 
the creation of Milton's "Comus," presented 
on Michaelmas Night, 1634, in the Great 
Hall of the castle. The first to hold the 
office — thenceforth only nominal — after the 
Restoration was the Earl of Carberry, whose 
seneschal was one Samuel Butler, a steward 
who may or may not have kept good accounts, 
but who used his pen to effective purpose in 
writing, in a chamber over the gate, the first 
portion of "Hudibras." 

Ludlow is the centre for fascinating excur- 
sions. The delicious air and most lovely 
scenery tempt one forth on roads that run 
between bird-haunted banks fringed with 
luxuriant bracken and lined with all manner 

258 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

of trees to whose very tops climbs the aspiring 
honeysuckle. The glint of red berries from 
the mountain ash, the drooping sprays of the 
larches, the silvery glimpses of far vistas 
framed in leafy green, the spicy forest fra- 
grances, the freshness and buoyancy of the 
air, all unite to make the spirit glad. From 
every rise in the road are views that range 
over a fair outspread of plain and valley, 
rimmed by gentle hills. All over Worcester- 
shire we looked, and into Wales, and up 
through Salop to where the Wrekin smiled 
a gracious recognition. Points of special in- 
terest abound, — Haye Wood, where Lady 
Alice, daughter of the Earl of Bridgwater, and 
her brothers lost their way and by their little 
adventure gave young Milton the suggestion 
for his Masque; St. Mary's Knoll, once 
crowned by a venerated image of the Virgin ; 
Oakley Park, with its Druid trees; the little 
church of Pipe Aston, with its curious semi- 
cirque of Norman carving over the door; 
Leinthall church, overtopped at either end 
by lofty yews ; British fort ; Tudor mansion ; 
storied battlefield. 

Our first goal was Richard's Castle in 
Hereford, dating from the reign of Edward 

259 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

the Confessor, — a Norman keep before the 
Norman Conquest. Nothing of that brave 
erection is left save a mound of earth and a 
bit of broken wall. Near by stands an old 
church with some remnants of fine glass and 
with the rare feature, in England, of a de- 
tached bell- tower. We lingered in the church 
yard, looking out from a massive recumbent 
slab that was cleft from end to end, as if the 
impatient sleeper could not wait for the Arch- 
angel's trump, eastward to the Malvern Hills, 
whose earthly blue melted as softly into the 
blue of the sky as life melts into death. But 
a line of rooks flapping roostward awoke us 
to the flight of time, and the pensive appeal 
of that quiet spot, with its lichened crosses 
and grave- mantling growths of grass and ivy, 
was dispelled by a donkey who thrust his head 
through a green casement in the hedge and 
waggled his long ears at us with a quizzical 
expression. 

An excursion that could not be foregone, 
however our consciences pricked us for delay, 
was that to Wigmore, the once impregnable 
hold of the Mortimers. As we left Ludlow, 
we looked back on the looming grey mass of 
its own still stupendous castle and were hardly 

260 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

prepared to find the rival fortress in such utter 
desolation of decay. Standing on its sentry 
height, girdled with its massive walls, it was 
once a menace to the English throne. Now 
such towers as yet remain are rent and ragged. 
Only a curtain of ivy guards the inner gate. 
Trees have sprung from the dirt- choked em- 
brasures, and purple thistles grow rank in the 
empty courts. Yet for all the rich cloaking 
of vine and wall- flower, all the carpeting of 
moss and blossom, Time has not made peace 
with this grim ruin. Something sullen and 
defiant still breathes from those gigantic frag- 
ments. Dark openings in the ground give 
glimpses of stone passages and yawning dun- 
geons that must render the place a paradise 
for boys. Thence we drove to Wigmore 
Abbey where the Mortimers lodged the 
priestly intercessors who had no light task 
to pray away the sins of that proud and ruth- 
less race. We found a farm resounding with 
the baaing of sheep and mooing of cows in- 
stead of with Latin chants. Wrought into 
the texture of the grange itself, a weather- 
stained house of stone, with, as we saw it, a 
row of decorative pigeons perched on the 
roof- tree, are remnants of the old carvings 

261 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

and window traceries. At the rear, a long, 
low building of the Shropshire black-and- 
white, with a great bundle of straw bulging 
from an upper window, retains a fine arched 
gateway. Pleached fruit trees, climbing roses, 
and purple clematis do their best to console 
the scene for its lost pieties. On the home- 
ward route, by way of yellow wheat fields, 
waving woods, and running water, we had 
a wonderful view of the Welsh mountains 
bathed in the opalescent hues of sunset, a 
divine lustre through which rang sweetly the 
vespers of the thrush, and could hardly per- 
suade ourselves that it was from those glori- 
fied heights the wave of war used to rush 
down to break in blood upon the Marches. 

Yet even the little round county of Here- 
fordshire, with its soft green levels, its apple 
orchards and cider-presses, its hop gardens, 
and those broad fields where graze its famous 
sheep and cattle, has tragic tales to tell. Wig- 
more Castle, indeed, is over the Hereford 
line. A few miles to the northwest are the 
ruins of Brampton-Bryan Castle, which testi- 
fies to the latest war- anguish of these western 
shires, the struggle to the death between 
Charles I and Parliament. Here Lady Har- 

262 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

ley was besieged for over a month by her 
royalist neighbour, Colonel Lingen, who — 
ill- done for a cavalier — came up against her, 
in the absence of her husband and son, with 
a force of six hundred men. Cheery, gallant, 
resourceful while the need lasted, Lady Har- 
ley gave way when the baffled enemy had 
withdrawn, and wrote her son that if the castle 
must undergo another siege, she was sure that 
God would spare her the seeing it. And hav- 
ing so written, she died the following day. In 
the spring the royalists returned with cannon 
and battered down the walls, burning and 
plundering. At the end of the long strife, 
Parliament awarded Sir Robert Harley, as 
some partial recompense for his sorrows and 
losses, the Lingen lands, but Edward Harley, 
the son of that brave, tender-hearted mother, 
called at once on Lady Lingen and presented 
her with the title-deeds. It may be doubted 
if all the Herefordshire annals record a nobler 
victory. 

The Wars of the Roses were waged with 
peculiar ferocity in this section of England. 
The great battle of Mortimer's Cross, which 
gave Edward IV his crown, was fought a little 
to the west of Leominster. Here old Owen 

2G3 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

Tudor, who had wedded Henry V's French 
Kate, daughter and widow of kings, — he 
whose grandson, Henry VII, brought in the 
Tudor line of English sovereigns, was taken 
prisoner. He was executed, with all the 
other prisoners of rank, in Hereford market- 
place, and his head was "set upon the highest 
grice of the market cross and a mad woman 
kemped his hair and washed away the blood 
from his face, and she got candles and set 
about him burning, more than one hundred. 
This Owen Tudor was father unto the Earl 
of Pembroke, and had wedded Queen Kath- 
erine, King Henry VI's mother, weening and 
trusting always that he should not be be- 
headed till he saw the axe and block, and 
when he was in his doublet he trusted on 
pardon and grace till the collar of his red 
velvet doublet was ripped off. Then he said, 
'That head shall lie on the stock that was 
wont to lie on Queen Katherine's lap,' and 
put his heart and mind wholly unto God, and 
full meekly took his death." 1 

Earlier civil conflicts, that between Ed- 
ward II and his barons, and that holier war 



1 " Gregory's Chronicle." In " Historical Collections of a Citi- 
zen of London in the Fifteenth Century." Camden Society: 1876. 

264 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

of liberty, won though lost, by Simon de 
Montfort against his king and prince, have 
left graphic memories in Herefordshire. But 
even these strifes seem recent beside the 
battle-marks of Offa the Saxon, who built an 
earthen dyke, still in fairly good preservation, 
from the Severn to the Wye, to keep the 
Welshmen back; and beside those thick-set 
British camps and Roman camps that testify 
to the stubborn stand of Caractacus and his 
Silures against the all- conquering legions. 

We were on a peaceful pilgrimage and 
could well dispense with visiting Coxwall 
Knoll, close above Brampton-Bryan, where 
Caractacus met his crushing defeat, and 
Sutton Walla, some five miles to the north of 
Hereford, where Offa, King of the Mercians, 
betrayed to assassination his guest, King 
Ethelbert of the East Angles ; but we ought 
to have sought out Holm Lacy, for the sake 
of the Sir Scudamour of Spenser's "Faery 
Queene," and to have visited Hope End, 
near Ledbury, in loving homage to Elizabeth 
Barrett Browning. And so we might, had 
it not been for the innate depravity of man 
as exemplified in the dourest driver that ever 
handled reins. His one aim throughout that 

265 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

trip was not to go anywhere we wished. He 
would sometimes seem to hesitate at a parting 
of the ways, but it was only to find out which 
road was our desire, when as deaf and dumb to 
all our protests as if he knew only the Silurian 
tongue, as impervious to parasol pokes as if 
he were cased in Roman mail, he would take 
the other. The only comfort that came to 
our exasperated souls was the reflection that 
at sundown we could dismiss Sir Stiffback 
with his ill-earned shillings and never see his 
iron phiz again, whereas the unfortunate 
women of his household, the possible wife, 
sister, daughter, would have to put up with 
the unflinching obduracy of that cross-grained 
disposition until he went the way of Roger de 
Mortimer. But not even this cromlech of a 
coachman, though with the worst intentions, 
could prevent our enjoying the pastoral 
charm of the quiet land through which we 
drove, for this county, as Fuller wrote, "doth 
share as deep as any in the alphabet of our 
English commodities, though exceeding in 
the W for wood, wheat, wool, and water." As 
for wood, we saw in Harewood Park, by 
which our Clod of Wayward Marl inadvert- 
ently drove us, chestnuts and beeches whose 

266 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

height and girth would do credit to California ; 
in point of wheat the county is said to be so 
fertile that, for all the wealth of cattle, the peo- 
ple have not time to make their own butter 
and cheese ; the wool was reckoned in Fuller's 
time the finest of all England; and the sal- 
mon-loved Wye, which rises, like the Severn, 
on the huge Plinlymmon mountain, flows 
with many picturesque turns and "crankling 
winds" across the county, receiving the Lug, 
on which Leominster is situate, and further 
down, the Monnow, which forms the Mon- 
mouth boundary. 

But if we failed to find the white-rose bower 
of Mrs. Browning's childhood, and her classic 

"garden-ground, 
With the laurel on the mound, 
And the pear-tree oversweeping 
A side-shadow of green air." 

— does the turf remember her Hector with 
"brazen helm of daffodilies" and "a sword 
of flashing lilies ? " — we were on poetic terri- 
tory in the streets of Hereford. It was here, 
as Mr. Dobell's happy discovery has shown, 
that a lyrist, Thomas Traherne, worthy of 
the fellowship of Herbert and of Vaughan 

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COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

passed his early years, a shoemaker's son, like 
Marlowe in another cathedral city, Canter- 
bury. If we could have seen Hereford as this 
humble little lad saw it, it would have been 
a celestial vision, for truly he said: "Cer- 
tainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet 
and curious apprehensions of the world than 
I when I was a child." His own description 
of this radiant star we so blindly inhabit as it 
first dazzled his innocent senses is too ex- 
quisite to be passed over: 

"The corn was orient and immortal wheat which 
never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought 
it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust 
and stones of the street were as precious as gold ; the 
gates were at first the end of the world. The green 
trees when I saw them first through one of the gates 
transported and ravished me ; their sweetness and un- 
usual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad 
with ecstacy, they were such strange and wonderful 
things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend 
creatures did the aged seem ! Immortal Cherubim ! 
And young men, glittering and sparkling angels; and 
maids, strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty ! Boys 
and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels : I 
knew not that they were born or should die. But all 
things abided eternally as they were in their proper 
places. Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, 
and something infinite behind everything appeared, 

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COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

which talked with my expectation and moved my de- 
sire. The City seemed to stand in Eden or to be built 
in Heaven." 

If this were the Hereford of the first half 
of the seventeenth century, the city has 
dimmed a little since, yet we found it a pleas- 
ant town enough, with the Wye murmuring 
beside it, and its ancient cathedral of heroic 
history reposing in its midst. Garrick was 
born in Hereford, and poor Nell Gwynne, 
and in the north transept of the cathedral is 
a brass to John Philips, who endeared him- 
self to all the county by his poem on " Cyder." 
We went to see the Preaching Cross that 
marks the site of a monastery of the Black 
Friars, neighboured now by the Red Cross 
Hospital for old soldiers and servants. One 
of these beneficiaries, in the prescribed "fus- 
tian suit of ginger colour," eagerly showed us 
about and was sorely grieved that we could 
not wait to hear his rambling chronicle to the 
end. The rest of our time in Hereford out- 
side our hostelry — the Green Dragon, most 
amiable of monsters — we spent in the cathe- 
dral, an old acquaintance, but so passing rich 
in beauties and in curiosities that at the end 
of our swift survey we were hardly more satis- 

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COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

fied than at the beginning. We will come 
back to it some time — to the grave old 
church that has grown with the centuries and, 
unabashed, mingles the styles of various 
periods, the church in which Stephen was 
crowned and Ethelbert buried; to the cro- 
ziered bishops in their niches, the two great, 
thirteenth- century bishops among them, 
D'Aquablanca, the worst of saints with the 
loveliest of tombs, and Cantilupe, so godly 
that he never allowed his sister to kiss him, 
of such healing virtues that even sick falcons 
were cured at his shrine ; to the Knights Tem- 
plars, mail-clad, treading down fell beasts; 
to the wimpled dames with praying hands, 
shadowed by angel- wings; to the Chapter 
Library with its chained tomes; and to that 
mediaeval Mappa Mundi (about 1313) show- 
ing the earth with its encircling ocean, Eden 
and Paradise above, and such unwonted geo- 
graphical features sprinkled about as the 
Phoenix, Lot's Wife, and the Burial Place of 
Moses. 

Our surly coachman deposited us at Ross, 
the little border town with houses sloping 
from the hilltop to the Wye, while behind and 
above the mall rises a tall grey spire. Here 

270 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

our faith in human nature was promptly 
restored by that contemplation of the virtues of 
The Man of Ross which even the public-house 
signboards forced upon us. This John Kyrle 
so lauded by Pope, was a cheery old bachelor 
of modest income, the most of which he ex- 
pended for the town in works of practical 
benevolence, planting elms, laying out walks, 
placing fountains, and caring for the poor. 

"Whose cause- way parts the vale with shady rows? 
Whose seats the weary traveler repose ? 
Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise ? 
'The Man of Ross,' each lisping babe replies." 

But the lisping babes are wrong as to this 
last particular, for Kyrle did not build the 
spire, although he gave the church its gallery 
and pulpit. 

At Ross we ought to have taken to the 
water, for the scenery of the Lower Wye, with 
its abrupt cliffs, rich woods, and smiling 
meadows, is one of the prides of England, but 
we had run so far behind our dates, by the 
dear fault of Shropshire, that we went on by 
train. The rail, however, follows the river, 
and we had — or thought we had — swift 
glimpses of the romantic ruins of Wilton 

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COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

Castle, one of the old Border keeps, and of 
Goodrich castle, where Wordsworth met the 
little maid of "We are Seven." This valley 
of the Wye, which was to the poet Gray the 
delight of his eyes and "the very seat of 
pleasure," yields striking effects in wooded 
crag and gorge at Symond's Yat, but we en- 
joyed hardly less the tranquil reaches of 
green pasture, where the afternoon sunshine 
still lay so warm that little groups of sheep 
were cuddled at the foot of every tree. The 
ancient town of Monmouth, in its nest of hills, 
reminded us not merely of its royal native, 
Henry V, 

— "Ay, he was born at Monmouth, 
Captain Gower" — 

but of that twelfth- century romancer, Geof- 
frey of Monmouth, whose "History of the 
Britons," with its fluent account of the doings 
of hitherto unheard-of kings, especially Arthur 
the Giant Killer and his false queen Guanhu- 
mara, so scandalised his contemporaries that 
they did not scruple to call him a "shameless 
and impudent liar" and to report that legions 
of devils had been seen hovering over his man- 
uscript. About seven miles to the southwest 

272 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

of Monmouth is Raglan Castle, where Charles 
I took refuge after Naseby. Its gallant lord, 
the Marquis of Worcester, then in his eighty- 
fourth year, stood a siege of ten weeks, not 
capitulating until the loyal little garrison, fast 
diminishing, was reduced to such extremities 
that the horses ate their halters for want of 
forage. I had visited, some fifteen years be- 
fore, those war-scarred towers, tapestried with 
marvellous masses of ivy, and from the win- 
dows of the Royal Apartments had looked 
out on that lovely western view in which the 
harassed Stuart took solace. Lord Herbert, 
son of the staunch old royalist, invented and 
constructed a machine, the terror of the peas- 
antry, which has a good claim to be counted 
the first steam-engine. The so-called Yellow 
Tower was the scene of his wizard craft. The 
Great Hall now lies open to wind and weather, 
and but one wall of the chapel stands, its two 
stone effigies peeping out from their ivy- 
curtained niches. 

We quitted the train at Tintern, where our 
stay was all too short, notwithstanding the 
memory of tranquil weeks spent there in a 
previous summer. The ruins of Tintern 
Abbey are of a peculiarly austere and noble 
18 273 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

beauty. Its foundation dates back to 1131, 
only three years after the coming of the Cis- 
tercians into England. It was the third of 
their English houses, which came to number 
nearly two hundred. It stood in its full grace, 
the Gothic style just leaning toward the Deco- 
rated, when the Dissolution struck its uses 
from it and left it to gradual decay. Roofed 
by the blue skies of a summer noon, with 
wooded hills looking in through the unglazed 
mullions of the windows, or in the glory of 
the moonlight, the silver lustre flooding empty 
nave and silent cloisters, and illuming with its 
searching rays rare bits of carven foliage, 
Tintern wears perhaps a purer loveliness in 
its desolation than ever before. Our farewell 
visit was paid in an early morning hour. In 
that freshness of the day, those slender pillars 
and arches delicately wrought presented an 
aspect more than ever grave and melancholy. 
There is nothing of the grotesque here, and 
comparatively little of ornamental detail to 
distract the mind from the impression of the 
whole. The rooks that peered over from 
their lofty perch above the great east window, 
whose remaining traceries were etched in 
shadow on the turf, and the bright- eyed little 

274 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

red-breasts that hopped fearlessly about did 
not, it is true, observe the Cistercian rule of 
silence ; but the shining wings of doves flutter- 
ing from one grey wall to another might well 
have been the embodied prayers of those 
White Monks who so often chanted matins 
at the long- since fallen altars. 

We went from the Abbey to the train. Still 
the railroad followed the winding river. A 
fleeting sight of the towering Wyndcliff re- 
minded me of a by-gone afternoon when, un- 
expectedly bringing up on a ramble at Moss 
Cottage, I undertook, quite too late for pru- 
dence, a solitary ascent of this inviting steep. 
From the summit I looked out over mellow- 
tinted autumnal woods to the looping ribbon 
of the Wye, the white cliffs known as the 
Twelve Apostles rising beyond, and still be- 
yond the sail- bearing Severn, with villages 
and church- towers discernible in the far dis- 
tance and, best of all, the rose of sunset glow- 
ing upon the face of the Black Mountains. 
It was a sublime vision, but when the western 
flush had faded out and I must needs descend 
by that ever- darkening path which took its 
zigzag course among thick yews and down 
slippery slabs of slate, I came to the conclu- 

275 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

sion it was not written that my neck should 
be broken on this side of the Atlantic. 

We had only an hour at Chepstow, but the 
picturesque river- town was not new to us, and 
the hour sufficed to revive our memories of 
its rock-based old castle overhanging the Wye, 
the castle where Jeremy Taylor was once im- 
prisoned, and its Norman church with deeply 
recessed doorway. At Chepstow we took 
train for Newport, crossing the strip of 
garden- land that lies between the Wye, the 
Gloucestershire boundary, and its almost 
parallel stream, the Usk. West Monmouth 
is Black Country, forming a part of the South 
Wales coal-field, and we were not surprised 
to find Newport a busy harbour, grimy with 
its exports of coal and iron. We heard a 
strange tongue spoken all about us and 
realised that Monmouthshire, nominally Eng- 
lish since the time of Henry VIII, is still 
largely Welsh in manners and in character. 
The old Newport is much obscured by the 
new. The castle, where Simon de Montfort 
took refuge, is in good part hidden behind a 
flourishing brewery, but the Church of St. 
Woollos, built high upon Stow Hill, still domi- 
nates the scene. This church has a history 

276 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

even older than its fine Norman architecture, 
for it is told that Harold once plundered the 
town, desecrating the original sanctuary and 
breaking open the cheeses, which he found 
filled with blood. Then he was aghast and 
repented, but a month later, according to the 
monastic record, "for that wickedness and 
other crimes" he fell at Hastings. 

Our goal was Caerleon, three miles up the 
Usk, a quiet little village that was once the 
capital of South Wales, once the Isca Silurum 
of the Romans, and once, in the misty realm 
of romance, that Caerleon-upon-Usk where 
Arthur was crowned and where the ninth of 
his twelve great battles was fought. Tenny- 
son's Lancelot relates to spellbound listeners 
in the Castle of Astolat how 

"at Caerleon had he helped his lord, 
When the strong neighings of the wild White Horse 
Set every gilded parapet shuddering." 

But the " Mabinogion," that treasury of 
fanciful old Welsh tales, gives, by way of con- 
trast, a naive and somewhat gaudy picture 
of the king enjoying his repose : 

"King Arthur was at Caerlleon upon Usk; and one 
day he sat in his chamber ; and with him were O wain 

277 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

the son of Urien, and Kynon the son of Clydno, and 
Kai the son of Kyner ; and Gwenhwyar and her hand- 
maidens at needlework by the window. ... In the 
center of the chamber, King Arthur sat upon a seat of 
green rushes, over which was spread a covering of 
flame-coloured satin; and a cushion of red satin 
was under his elbow. . . . And the King went to 
sleep." 

If the ghosts of the Second Augustan Legion 
could return for an hour to this their frontier 
station, deep in the British wilds, they would 
find ranged and labelled in a neat museum 
shards of their pottery, broken votive tablets, 
fragments of sculptured figures, among them a 
Medusa whose stony stare might seem to have 
taken effect, urns whose ashes were long since 
scattered, bits of mosaic pavement, coins, 
lamps, needles, hairpins, waifs and strays of 
their "unconsidered trifles." But the fainter 
wraith of King Arthur would discover no 
more than a weedy mound and hollow in a 
ragged field, where autumnal dandelions keep 
the only glints of his golden memory. We 
met there an old labourer stooping beneath 
the heavy sack upon his shoulder. He told 
us that the mound was Arthur's Round Table, 
but as for the hollow — apparently the site of 

278 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

a Roman open amphitheatre — he could only 
shake his grey head and confide: "They do 
say as was a grand palace there long ago and 
one day it all sunk under, — sunk way down 
into the ground." 

The Usk, which has reflected such lost 
splendours, empties into the broad estuary 
of the Severn a little lower down than the Wye 
which rejoins the greater river at Chepstow. 
The Severn, which has its rising not two miles 
from the Wye in the Welsh mountains, makes 
a wider sweep to the east, crossing Shropshire, 
Worcester, and Gloucester. Worcester, in- 
deed, mainly consists of the Middle Severn 
valley, with ranges of low hills on either side. 
This fertile basin abounds, like the Hereford 
vale of the Wye, in apple- orchards and pear- 
orchards, hop-gardens and wheat-fields, but 
the enterprising little shire has developed, too, 
a number of manufacturing industries. On 
the north it runs up into the Black Country of 
Staffordshire ; Dudley, Stourbridge, and Old- 
bury are murky with the smoke and smudge 
of factory chimneys. Glass is a specialty of 
Stourbridge, carpets of Kidderminster, salt 
of Droitwich, and needles and fishhooks of 
Redditch. Nail- making used to be the bread 

279 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

and beer of ten thousand cottages at the foot 
of the Clent and Lickey Hills. 

But intermingled with its thriving crafts 
and trades is another wealth of historic asso- 
ciations and natural beauties. In the dense 
woods which once covered the county, hostile 
bands have dodged or sought one another 
from time immemorial, notably during the 
Civil Wars of Simon de Montfort and of the 
Roses. Even so late as the Parliamentary 
War, there remained forest enough to do 
good service to a fugitive. It was in an oak 
of Boscobel Wood, on the Salop border, that 
after the disastrous battle of Worcester 

"the younger Charles abode 
Till all the paths were dim, 
And far below the Roundhead rode 
And hummed a surly hymn." 

The points of specific literary interest are 
not many. Little St. Kenelm underwent his 
martyrdom by the Clent Hills; Richard 
Baxter ministered for twenty- two years to 
a rough flock in Kidderminster; Samuel 
Butler was born in Strensham-on-the-Avon; 
Samuel Johnson went to school in Stour- 
bridge; and the Leasowes, near by, was the 

280 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

home of Shenstone, who made it one of 
the most attractive estates in England. But 
the Malvern Hills keep a great, dim memory, 
that of the fourteenth- century visionary asso- 
ciated with the West Midland allegory of 
"Piers Plowman." We are not sure of his 
name, though we speak of him as Langland ; 
the rugged, vigorous old poem in its three 
versions may yet be proved to be of com- 
posite rather than single authorship ; we our- 
selves, though of Long Will's discipleship, 
had not faith enough in the personal tradition 
to visit the reputed birthplace at Cleobury 
Mortimer in Shropshire ; but on those breezy 
slopes still seems to linger the wistful presence 
of a gaunt, "forwandred" clerk who 

"In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne, 
On a May mornynge on Malverne hulles" 

dreamed the Easter dream, still unfulfilled on 
earth, of human brotherhood. 
These gracious heights, standing 

"Close as brother leans to brother, 
When they press beneath the eyes 
Of some father praying blessings 
From the gifts of Paradise," 

gave hiding for four years to Sir John Old- 
castle, the genial Lollard who made merry 

281 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

with Prince Hal, but would not renounce his 
faith, and was finally given up by the over- 
orthodox young king to the bishops. Henry V 
himself was present at the martyrdom, pecu- 
liarly revolting, but the worst of it all is that 
Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, 
endorsed the Roman Catholic caricature and 
wronged a true and generous spirit in his in- 
effaceable portrait of Sir John Falstaff, Prince 
Hal's " old lad of the castle." It must be that 
Raggedstone Hill, which casts a curse on 
whomsoever its shadow touches, gloomed with 
peculiar blackness over the hunted knight. 
Its ominous shade is said to have stolen on 
Cardinal Wolsey and on those royal fugitives 
of the Red Rose, Margaret of Anjou and the 
hapless young Prince Edward. 

From the summit of Worcester Beacon and 
from other of the higher Malvern crests the 
view ranges, on a clear day, over some fifteen 
counties and embraces the six momentous 
battlefields of Shrewsbury, Mortimer's Cross, 
Edge Hill, Worcester, Evesham and Tewkes- 
bury, and the three cathedrals of Hereford, 
Worcester, and Gloucester, besides the rem- 
nants of six great religious houses of mediaeval 
England, — Great and Little Malvern, Per- 

282 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

shore, Evesham, Deerhurst and Tewkesbury. 
Little Malvern Priory, established in the 
twelfth century by a band of Benedictine 
monks from Worcester who sought the wilds 
that they might emulate the life of hermits, 
survives only in fragments, but the church of 
Great Malvern Priory, an earlier outgrowth 
from Worcester, keeps its Norman interior, 
with rich treasures of stained glass and 
miserere carvings. We had passed through 
the Vale of Evesham toward the close of our 
long Midland drive and seen the scant relics 
of its mitred abbey, but we fail to follow the 
Avon on to Pershore, one of the richest and 
most powerful of the old monastic founda- 
tions. Not only were these monasteries 
planted in the fairest and most fruitful lands 
of the county, but a large portion of Worces- 
tershire was owned by them and by the neigh- 
bouring abbeys of Gloucestershire. In all 
this horde of priests one has a special claim 
to literary remembrance, — Layamon, who 
dwelt in the hamlet of Ernley, near the 
junction of the Severn and the Stour. He 
constitutes an important link in the passing 
on of the Arthurian legend, which, first re- 
lated in Latin prose by that entertaining 

283 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

prelate, Geoffrey of Monmouth, had been 
already rendered into French verse by Wace, 
the professional chronicler of the Plantag- 
enets. Lay anion retold and amplified the 
story, using the French poem as his basis, but 
aided by two other works whose identity is 
doubtful. 

"Layamon these books beheld and the leaves he 
turned. He them with love beheld. Aid him God 
the Mighty ! Quill he took with his fingers, and wrote 
on book-skin, and the true words set together, and the 
three books pressed into one." 

We could pay only a flying visit to Malvern 
this summer, but in other summers have re- 
sorted thither again and again for the refresh- 
ment of the blithe air and pure water and of 
walking on those turfy hills where many a 
grateful sojourner has left path or seat to ease 
the climber's way. 

Worcester, too, was familiar ground, and 
this time we gave but a few hours to the 
"Faithful City," which paid so dearly for its 
steadfast loyalty to Charles I. The un- 
speakable Parliamentarians proved nearly as 
destructive as the Danes, who, in the ninth 
century and again in the eleventh, had sacked 
it with fire and sword. The militant Presby- 

284 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

terians wreaked their piety most of all upon 
the Cathedral, leaving it roofless, its splendid 
glass all shattered, its brasses wrenched away, 
its altars desecrated and torn down. We 
found the red- brick town upon the Severn 
brisk and cheerful, with its proud shop- 
window display of its own products, from 
the Royal Worcester China to Worcestershire 
Sauce, with the deeply laden barges that 
almost hid the river; its lively hop market; 
and its grunting sows, each with her litter of 
recalcitrant little pigs, driven in a meandering 
course through the main street by ruddy boys 
and girls. The cathedral, whose memories 
embrace St. Dunstan and St. Wulfstan and 
that stout-hearted old martyr of Oxford, 
Bishop Latimer — who had himself once pre- 
sided at the burning of a friar — uplifted 
our hearts with its august vista of nave and 
choir. The crowned tenant of that choir, 
King John, ought to be troubled in his gilded 
rest by the proximity of a Prince Arthur, 
though not the Arthur to whom he did such 
grievous wrong. The best of the cathedral 
is, to my thinking, the solemn grace of the 
crypt, beneath whose light- pillared arches 
stand about various stone figures of rueful 

285 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

countenance. After their centuries of sun- 
light, high- niched on the central tower, the 
Restorer has scornfully dislodged them and 
dungeoned them down here. 

Just below Worcester the Severn is aug- 
mented by the Teme, which has valiantly cut 
its way through the line of western hills to 
join the court of Sabrina, and at Tewkes- 
bury, on the Gloucester border, it receives its 
most famous affluent, Shakespeare's Avon. 
Tewkesbury was new to us, and we lingered 
there two days, wishing we might make them 
twenty. As it was we had to forego the de- 
lightful trip on the Severn to Deerhurst, an 
old monastic town whose pre-Norman church 
is said to be of extremely curious architecture. 

Tewkesbury Abbey, which outranks in size 
ten of the twenty-eight English cathedrals, is 
one of the most illustrious churches in the 
United Kingdom. Unlike most of the larger 
monastic establishments, it was under the 
control of a succession of great families whose 
deeds and misdeeds form no small part of the 
history of England. Fitz-Hamon, kin to the 
Conqueror, swept away what buildings of 
the old Saxon abbey he may have found there, 
and erected the magnificent Norman church 

286 






COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

which still awes the beholder. The ashes of 
Fitz-Hamon, who died in 1107, rest near the 
High Altar. The next lord of Tewkesbury to 
be buried in the Abbey was Gilbert de Clare, 
one of the signers of Magna Charta. The 
name of his father, Richard de Clare, headed 
the list, and one of the seven copies of the 
Great Charter was deposited in the Abbey. 
Every lord of Tewkesbury after Gilbert de 
Clare was interred in this church, which, for 
the next two hundred and fifty years, until 
the lordship of Tewkesbury was absorbed 
into the Crown, grew ever more splendid with 
costly monuments. The widow of Gilbert 
de Clare married the brother of Henry III, 
Richard, Duke of Cornwall, but although she 
thus became a countess of many titles and one 
of the first ladies of the land, she asked, in 
dying, to be buried beside the husband of her 
youth in Tewkesbury. To this her second 
husband would not agree, but he was mag- 
nanimous enough to send her poor, homesick 
heart back to the Abbey in a silver vase, 
which was duly placed in Earl Gilbert's mar- 
ble mausoleum. 

The De Clares of Tewkesbury, Earls of 
Gloucester and Hereford, were a warrior race. 

287 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

The second Gilbert, called the Red Earl, 
fought both with Simon de Montfort, and 
against him, and the third Gilbert, his son, 
fell at Bannockburn. By his early death the 
lordship of Tewkesbury passed from the De 
Clares, who had held it for nearly a century, 
to the young earl's brother-in-law, Hugh le 
Despencer. This new Earl of Gloucester 
had succeeded Piers Gaveston in the perilous 
favour of Edward II. When Roger de Mor- 
timer, by the unhallowed aid of Queen Isabel, 
triumphed over the king, the elder Despencer, 
a man of ninety, was hanged at Bristol, and 
his son, Hugh le Despencer, crowned with 
nettles, was swung from the gallows fifty feet 
high, in a hubbub of mockeries and rejoicings, 
at Hereford. His widow collected the scat- 
tered quarters of his body, exposed in various 
towns, and interred them in the Abbey under 
a richly carved and coloured monument. 
The Despencers, though no longer Earls of 
Gloucester, held the lordship of Tewkesbury 
for wellnigh another hundred years, cherish- 
ing and beautifying the fabric of the church 
and adding lavishly to its memorials of bronze 
and marble and to its treasure of chalices, 
copes, and jewels. 

288 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

Early in the fifteenth century the male line 
of the Despencers became extinct, and the 
Lady Isabel, sister of the last Lord Despencer, 
succeeded to the ecclesiastical honours of the 
family. Married in the Abbey at the age of 
eleven to Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Wor- 
cester, she was widowed ten years later and 
found her solace in building an exquisite 
chapel, known as the Warwick Chantry, in 
her husband's memory. Her second husband, 
cousin to the first, was Richard Beauchamp, 
Earl of Warwick, whom she commemorated 
in the still more elaborate Beauchamp Chapel 
at Warwick; but she herself chose to lie at 
Tewkesbury. Her daughter married War- 
wick the King- maker and became the mother 
of two fair girls of most pathetic story. The 
elder, Isabel, was wedded to George, Duke 
of Clarence, brother of Edward III, — "false, 
fleeting, perjur'd Clarence," — who is sup- 
posed to have been murdered in the Tower 
through the agency of his brother Richard — 
drowned, the whisper went, in a butt of Malm- 
sey wine. A fortnight earlier his wife and an 
infant child had died, probably of poison. A 
son and daughter survived, who, for the royal 
blood that flowed in their veins, were regarded 
19 289 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

with uneasiness by the Tudor kings and ul- 
timately sent to the block. The daughter, 
Margaret Plantagenet, superintended the ed- 
ucation of the Princess Mary, and was once 
described by Henry VIII himself as " the most 
saintly woman in England." But she was the 
mother of Cardinal Pole, who had angered 
the tyrant and was on the Continent out of 
his reach ; so this reverend and gracious lady, 
at the age of sixty- eight, had her stately head 
clumsily hacked off by a prentice executioner 
on Tower Hill, where her innocent brother 
had perished forty- two years before. The 
second daughter of the Countess Isabel had 
an even more pitiful life than her sister's, for 
her first husband was Prince Edward, the last 
Lancastrian, and then, after he had been 
foully slain, she strangely accepted the hand 
of one of his murderers, Richard of Glouces- 
ter, the worst of the Yorkists, by whom she 
was soon, it would appear, coolly put out 
of the world. A favourite saying of the 
county, probably having reference to the 
extraordinary number and wealth of its 
religious houses, runs: "As sure as God is 
in Gloucestershire," but one can hardly read 
these tragedies of Tewkesbury without feel- 

290 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

ing that the Devil has been no infrequent 
sojourner there. 

The lamentable Wars of the Roses, which 
had drenched England with blood, threw up 
their last red spray against the Abbey. The 
resolute Queen Margaret and her son had 
attempted, with an army raised by the Duke 
of Somerset, to get possession of Gloucester, 
but they found it already held by the Yorkists 
and hastened on to Tewkesbury. Still weary 
from their forced march, they were attacked 
by Edward at break of a summer dawn (1471) 
while the monks were chanting matins in the 
Abbey, and sustained a signal defeat. The 
place of slaughter is still known as Bloody 
Meadow. The Duke of Somerset, with a 
few knights and squires, took refuge within 
the sacred walls, but Edward and his fol- 
lowers, hot for vengeance, rushed in to slay 
them even there. The abbot, who had just 
been celebrating mass, came from the altar 
and, holding the consecrated host high in his 
hands, stood between the furious Yorkists 
and their prey. The war- wrath was for the 
moment stayed, and Edward gave his word 
to respect the peace of the sanctuary. But 
after a service of thanksgiving, the blood- 

291 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

anointed king and his fierce nobles withdrew 
to a house hard by, where that unhappy 
younger Edward, the legitimate heir to the 
throne, was brought a defenceless prisoner 
into their presence, insulted, assailed, and 
slain. The rumour went that the king him- 
self had with his gauntleted hand struck the 
royal youth across the mouth, and in an in- 
stant the others, like wild beasts, were upon 
him, Richard of Gloucester in the front. It 
is believed that the mangled, boyish body was 
buried in the Abbey under the central tower. 
But while the lords of Tewkesbury stormed 
through their brief careers, coming one after 
another to lie, battle-bruised, stabbed, head- 
less, quartered, even with the halter-mark 
about the neck, within the holy hush of the 
great church, its Benedictine monks went on 
a quiet way, tilling the soil, writing glosses, 
copying service-books, chanting prayers, ex- 
ercising a large hospitality and a larger charity. 
At the Dissolution, the townspeople, who had 
from time immemorial used the nave as their 
parochial church, bought the choir and chapels 
from Henry VIII, so that this noble structure, 
so significant in English story, escaped the fate 
of Furness, Tintern, and the many more. 

292 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

We had ourselves a little difficulty in getting 
beyond the nave. We had gone in an hour 
before service on a Sunday evening, hoping 
to be allowed to walk around the choir, but 
we incurred scathing rebuke from a red- 
haired verger, who had practised like elo- 
quence on Sunday automobile parties until 
his flow of denunciation was Hebraic. We 
gave way at once, expressed due contrition, 
and meekly sat down to wait for evensong. 
Whereupon, after furtively scrutinising us 
from behind one pillar after another, he cau- 
tiously approached and with searching little 
blue eyes severely inquired if we really in- 
tended to stay for the service, — "all through 
the sermon, ye understand; not just for the 
music." Our reply so raised us in his opinion 
that he actually took us on the rounds, prov- 
ing an intelligent and even jocose conductor, 
and we, for our part, heard the sermon to the 
very end, not daring to stir from our places 
until the last note of "Milton's organ" had 
died away. 

Many visitors come to this attractive old 
town, with its timbered houses and pleasant 
river- walks, for the sake of "John Halifax, 
Gentleman." The scenes of Mrs. Craik's 

293 



COUNTIES OP THE SEVERN VALLEY 

tender romance, Abel Fletcher's dwelling, the 
mill on the Avon, the tannery, the remains of 
the famous hedge, the garden where the two 
lads talked, are pointed out as soberly and 
simply as that ancient house in Church Street 
whose floor is said still to keep the stain of 
princely blood, or the cross where the Duke 
of Somerset and his companions, dragged 
from the shelter of the Abbey in violation of 
the king's own promise, were beheaded. 

But the Severn, with ever- broadening flow, 
a tidal river now that fills and shallows twice 
a day, bears onward to the sea. Her course 
lies for a while through orchards and wheat- 
fields. The Cotswolds, separating the Severn 
valley from the basin of the Thames and con- 
stituting the bulk of Gloucestershire, rise in 
billowy outlines on the east and, presently, 
Dean Forest, one of the few remaining patches 
of England's formerly abundant woods, up- 
lifts its "broad and burly top" on the west. 
The earth beneath those oaks and beeches 
has hoards of mineral wealth, and furnaces 
are scattered through the forest glades. At 
Gloucester the Severn divides, that 

''with the more delight 
She might behold the towne of which she 's wondrous proud." 

294 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

And a fine old town it is, still keeping, in its 
four right-angled streets, the original Roman 
plan. Large vessels can make their way up 
the Severn as far as Gloucester, which Eliza- 
beth, to Bristol's neighbourly disgust, char- 
tered as a seaport, though the Berkeley Canal, 
opened in 1827, is now the regular channel. 
The cathedral stands upon ground hallowed 
since the seventh century. This building, for 
all the solemn grandeur of its Norman nave, 
is of most interest, from an architectural point 
of view, because of its gradual development 
of the Perpendicular style, gloriously mani- 
fest in choir and cloister. Its masons seem 
to have been particularly ingenious, for the 
building abounds in original and fanciful 
features of which the Whispering Gallery is 
only an example. Its martyr is John Hooper, 
Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester. One 
of Mary's earliest victims, he was sent from 
London back to Gloucester, where he was 
greatly beloved, to be burned before the eyes 
of his own flock. Many royal prayers have 
been murmured beneath these vaulted roofs, 
and many royal feasts of Severn salmon and 
lamprey-pie held in the grey city. The 
Saxon kings were much at Gloucester; Wil- 

295 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

liam the Conqueror spent his Yule-tides here 
whenever he could, and here, in the chapter 
house, he ordered the compilation of Domes- 
day Book; Rufus, Henry I, Henry II, and 
John often visited the town, and Henry III, 
as a boy of ten, was crowned in the cathedral. 
Parliaments were held in Gloucester by Ed- 
ward I, Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V, 
and from Gloucester Richard III, with whom 
murder had grown to be a habit, is supposed 
to have sent secret orders to the Tower for the 
smothering of his little nephews. In a side- 
chapel is the tomb of Robert, Duke of Nor- 
mandy, eldest son of the conqueror. The 
effigy, of Irish oak, is so instinct with force 
and vigour in its only half recumbent posture 
that the iron screen seems really necessary to 
hold the Norman down. But the royal burial 
that made the fortunes of the cathedral was 
that of the wretched Edward II, whose cano- 
pied tomb in the choir became a favourite 
shrine of pilgrimage. 

Still the Severn, now with a burden of 
heavily freighted barges, a mighty flood that 
has left more than one hundred miles behind 
the tiny pool, three inches deep, in which it 
rose, sweeps on, past the stern walls of Berke- 

296 



COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 

ley Castle, where Edward II was cruelly done 
to death, toward the Somerset boundary. 
Here it receives the waters of the lower Avon, 
on which the great port of Bristol stands, and 
so the proud Sabrina leads her retinue of 
streams into the Bristol Channel, 

"Supposing then herself a sea-god by her traine." 



297 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

THE three southwestern counties of Eng- 
land, Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, 
reach out, like the hearts of their 
sons, into the wild Atlantic. Many a West- 
ward Ho adventure was sped from Bristol, 
Bideford, Plymouth, Dartmouth, and even 
from Topsham, which long served as the 
port of Exeter. The far-sea Elizabethan 
sailors and their dauntless commanders, 
those "Admirals All" whose praises a living 
poet of these parts, Henry Newbolt, has sung, 
came largely from this corner of England. 
The father of Sir Francis Drake was a 
Tavistock tar. That dreamer of illimitable 
dreams, Sir Walter Raleigh, was born in 
the little Devon village of East Budleigh. 
Another Devon village, familiar to Raleigh's 
boyhood, Ottery St. Mary, is the native place 
of Coleridge, whose immortal sea-ballad 
came into being just over the Somerset 
border, in those radiant days when he and 

298 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

Wordsworth, two young poets in the fulness 
of their friendship and the freshness of their 
inspiration, would go wandering together, 
from their homes in Nether Stowey, off on 
the Quantock Hills, — days commemorated 
by Wordsworth in " The Prelude." 

"Upon smooth Quantock's airy ridge we roved, 
Unchecked we loitered 'mid her sylvan courts; 
Thou in bewitching words, with happy heart, 
Didst chant the vision of that Ancient Man, 
The bright-eyed Mariner." 

My first view of the Quantocks was had, 
some years ago, from Exmoor. Coming 
through North Devon, we had been walking 
for hours, knee- deep in heather, over that 
high, rolling moorland where the red deer 
still run wild. The pollen rose in clouds 
about our heads. Black-faced sheep and 
white- tailed rabbits and startled, flurrying 
heath-cocks shared, but did not break, the 
rapture of that solitude. Bell-heather and 
rose-heather and white heather mingled their 
hues, at a little distance, in a rippling sea of 
purple. We lay down in it, and the fragrant 
sprays closed warm about us, while the soft 
sky seemed almost to touch our faces. We 

299 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

were supremely happy and we hoped that we 
were lost. We had long been out of sight of 
human habitation, but our compass served 
us better than we wished, and when, with a 
covert sense of disappointment, though the 
sun was red on the horizon, we came at last 
upon a woman and child gathering whortle- 
berries in a dimple of the moor, we learned 
that we were, as we should have been, in the 
heart of the Lorna Doone country. 

All lovers of Blackmore's delectable ro- 
mance remember that its modest hero, John 
Ridd, of the parish of Oare, was a Somerset 
man. "Zummerzett thou bee'st, Jan Ridd, 
and Zummerzett thou shalt be." But the 
Doone glen, which actually was, in the latter 
part of the seventeenth century, the hold of a 
marauding band of outlaws, lies on Badge- 
worthy Water, a part of the Devon boundary. 
We ate our handful of whortleberries in 
Devon, but soon, following directions, found 
ourselves on the brow of a steep incline, 
peering over upon a farmhouse, known as 
Lorna's Bower, in the valley below. Scram- 
bling down the declivity as best we might, 
we crossed the Badgeworthy by means of a 
log and a hand-rail, climbed a fence inhos- 

300 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

pitably placed at the end of this rude bridge, 
and thus made unceremonious entrance into 
Somerset. They were gruff of speech at 
Lorna's Bower, but kind of heart, and treated 
the belated wanderers well, feasting us on 
the inevitable ham and eggs, with a last taste 
of Devonshire cream, and giving us the warm 
corner of the settle by the great, peat- burning 
fireplace. A sheepskin waistcoat, with the 
wool yet on, lay across the rheumatic knees 
of our host, and hams and sides of bacon 
dangled from the rafters overhead. 

According to the saying "It always rains 
on Exmoor," the next morning broke in 
storm, and we made slow progress under the 
rain and over the mud along the Badge- 
worthy. All our path was a Waterslide, yet 
we came at last to the Doone valley, where 
tumbled heaps of stone mark the site of the 
felons' houses. Foxglove and bracken and 
heather would have whispered us the gossip 
of the place, but a sudden spurt of especially 
violent rain drove us on to a shepherd's hut 
for refuge. Two sportsmen, booted and 
spurred, with their horses saddled in the shed, 
all ready to mount and ride if the Exmoor 
hunt should sweep that way, were there be- 

301 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

fore us. One of them told us that his own 
house had the dints of the Doones' terrible 
blows on one of its oak doors. As the 
weather had gone from bad to worse, we 
abandoned our walking trip, bestowed our- 
selves in a creakity cart, the only vehicle 
there obtainable, and drove past the little 
Oare church, where John and Lorna were 
so tragically wedded, over "Robbers' 
Bridge," and on to the top of Oare Hill. 
Here we paused for a memorable view of the 
rain- silvered landscape, with Dunkery Beacon 
glimmering above. On through blurred pic- 
tures of beautiful scenery we went, into the 
village of Porlock, sweet with roses, and 
plunging down Porlock Hill, we held on our 
gusty way to Minehead. The hostelries of 
this favourite watering-place being full, we 
pushed on by an evening train to Taunton, a 
fair town of heroic history. In the stormy 
times of Charles I, it was twice gallantly 
defended by Admiral Blake, himself a son of 
Somerset, against the cavalier forces. Forty 
years later, when the unpopular James II 
had succeeded to his brother's throne, Taun- 
ton frankly embraced the perilous cause of 
the Duke of Monmouth, welcoming him 

302 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

with joyous ceremonies. In Taunton mar- 
ket-place he was proclaimed king, and from 
Taunton he issued his royal proclamations. 
The Duke was utterly defeated at Sedge- 
moor, three miles to the east of Bridgewater, 
in what Macaulay designates as "the last 
fight deserving the name of a battle that has 
been fought on English ground." The 
simple Somerset folk who had followed the 
banners of Monmouth were punished with 
pitiless severity. The brutal officers made 
a jest of the executions. A range of gibbets, 
with their ghastly burdens, crossed the moor, 
but Taunton was the especial victim of the 
royal vengeance. A hundred prisoners were 
put to death there by Kirke and his "lambs," 
and wellnigh another hundred hanged by 
such process of law as was embodied in 
Jeffrey's "Bloody Assize." 

But we would not linger in Taunton, — 
no, not even for the sake of its gentle Eliza- 
bethan poet, Samuel Daniel, nor would we 
stay our journey for trips to the places of 
varied interest on either side. A little to the 
southwest is Wellington, which gave The 
Iron Duke his title. Going north from there 
one would come soon to Milverton, the birth- 

303 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

place of Dr. Thomas Young, that ingenious lin- 
guist who first began to read the riddle of the 
Sphinx; for he had deciphered some half 
dozen of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in ad- 
vance of Champollion's great announcement. 
A few miles further to the north is Combe 
Flory, the pleasant parsonage which Sidney 
Smith made so gay, even binding his books, 
and theological books at that, in brightest 
colours. To get a tropical effect, and to hoax 
his guests, he hung oranges from his garden 
shrubs, and to gratify a lady who hinted that 
deer would ornament the little park, he fitted 
out his two donkeys — who doubtless had 
their opinion of him and of his doings — with 
branching antlers, and stationed them before 
the windows for a pastoral effect. Well 
away to the east of Taunton is Ilchester, the 
birthplace of that illustrious thirteenth- cen- 
tury friar, Roger Bacon, a necromancer to his 
own generation, and a pioneer in scientific 
method to ours; and near by Ilchester is 
Odcombe, where Tom Coryatt, stoutest- 
soled of travellers, was born. He claimed 
to have walked, between May and October 
of 1608, no less than nineteen hundred and 
seventy -five miles over the continent of 

304 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

Europe, and had just achieved a pilgrimage 
to Jerusalem and a call on the Great Mogul 
when, under the eastern stars, he died. 
England profited by his travels in the enter- 
taining volume commonly known as Coryatt's 
" Crudities," as well as in that foreign elegance 
of table-forks which he is said to have 
introduced. 

A mightier spell than any of these was 
upon us, the spell of Glastonbury, but I do 
not know why we did not give a few hours 
to Athelney, which lay directly in our route. 
It was here, on an alder- forested island in a 
waste of fens and marshes, at the confluence 
of the Parrett and the Tone, that King Alfred 
took shelter when the Danes had overrun the 
land. Here he lost that "Alfred's Jewel" 
which is now the treasure of the Ashmolean 
Museum in Oxford; here this otherwise 
impeccable monarch burned the cakes ; and 
from here he made such successful sallies 
against the enemy that he delivered England 
and regained his throne. 

The county of Somerset, a land of broad, 

green valleys enclosed by rugged ranges of 

hill and upland, has been compared in form 

to an arm slightly bent about the eastern 

20 305 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

and southern shores of Bristol Channel. 
The river Parrett crosses it at the elbow, 
dividing it into a southern section, — moors, 
bogs, mountains, with the deep vale of the 
river Tone — and a northern part, larger 
and more populous, but hardly less broken. 
Above the Parrett, and almost parallel with 
it, runs the river Brue, draining that once 
vast peat swamp known as the Brent Marshes. 
Glastonbury now stands on the north bank 
of the Brue, but at some remote period was 
islanded in the midst of the river. The 
Britons — if the wise say true — called it 
The Appletree Isle, or Avalon, — a name 
caught up in the golden meshes of Arthurian 
romance. The wounded king but 

"passes to the Isle Avilion, 
He passes and is heal'd and cannot die." 

The Britons in their heathen days had 
dreamed of a fairyland where death and 
sorrow entered not, the Celtic Tir-na-n'Og, 
an Island of Immortal Youth hid somewhere 
in the flushed, mysterious west, and the 
Christian faith, that came so early to Glaston- 
bury, did not destroy but gathered to itself 
the wistful hope, so that the site of one of the 

306 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

earliest churches in England became the 
centre of strangely blended legends. It was 
in the Isle of Avalon, according to Geoffrey 
of Monmouth, that the sword Excalibur was 
forged, and after Arthur had passed from 
mortal ken, he was not dead, but still, through 
the waiting centuries, 

"Mythic Uther's deeply wounded son 
In some fair space of sloping greens 
Lay, dozing, in the vale of Avalon, 
And watched by weeping queens." 

Yet the mediaeval voices, that we would 
gladly believe more simply than we may, 
tell us that Arthur was buried at Glaston- 
bury in a sarcophagus hollowed out of the 
trunk of an oak, that the penitent Guinevere 
was laid at his feet, that the skeletons were 
uncovered and removed to the church in the 
reign of Henry II, and were seen by so sane a 
witness as Leland so late as the middle of 
the sixteenth century. But in King Arthur, 
death is life, and not his reputed grave, nor 
the giant bones folk wondered at, nor the 
golden lock of Guinevere that crumbled at a 
monk's too eager clutch, could shake the 
faith in his second coming. Malory, writing 

307 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

in the fifteenth century, illustrates even in his 
half denial the persistency of that expecta- 
tion: 

" Yet some men say in many parts of England that 
King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our 
Lord Jesu into another place, and men say that he 
shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I 
will not say it shall be so, but rather, I will say, — 
here in this world he changed his life, but many men 
say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: 
Hie jacet Arthur us Rex quondam Rexque juturus." 

Arthurian legends are attached to other 
places in Somersetshire, notably to Cadbury, 
whose earlier name was Camelot, and to its 
adjacent village of Queen's Camel. Here 
on the river Camel cluster Arthurian names, 
— King Arthur's Palace, a moated mound ; 
King Arthur's Well, a spring of magic vir- 
tues; King Arthur's Hunting Causeway, an 
old track across the fields ; and here the tra- 
dition of a great battle lingers. But Glas- 
tonbury is not only an Arthurian shrine; it 
was once, in purer days than ours, the keeper 
of the Holy Grail. 

"To whom the monk: 'The Holy Grail! . . . 

What is it? 

The phantom of a cup that comes and goes?' 
308 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

"'Nay, monk, what phantom?' answer 'd Percivale. 
'The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord 
Drank at the last sad supper with his own. 
This, from the blessed land of Aromat — 
After the day of darkness, when the dead 
Went wandering o'er Moriah — the good saint, 
Arimathsean Joseph, journeying brought 
To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn 
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord. 
And there awhile it bode; and if a man 
Could touch or see it, he was healed at once, 
By faith, of all his ills. But then the times 
Grew to such evil that the holy cup 
Was caught away to Heaven, and disappear'd.' 

"To whom the monk: 'From our old books I know 
That Joseph came of old to Glastonbury, 
And there the heathen prince, Arviragus, 
Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build; 
And there he built with wattles from the marsh 
A little lonely church.'" l 

Dreamy hours were those we spent under 
the shadow of Glastonbury Tor, among the 
tranquil ruins of that once so glorious abbey, 
strolling about with a motley company of 
sheep, chickens, and tourists over what is 
perhaps the most ancient consecrated ground 
in England. Hither came St. Joseph of 
Arimathsea with his eleven companions and 
here the staff of the saint, as he thrust it into 



Tennyson's "The Holy Grail," 36-64. 
309 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

the ground, put forth leaf and blossom as a 
signal that the resting-place was reached. 
The little wattled oratory that the Archangel 
Gabriel commanded and the pagan king per- 
mitted them to build on a waste island of the 
marsh was succeeded, in course of time, by 
a primitive form of monastery, where St. 
Patrick, his mission to Ireland accomplished, 
dwelt many years and died. Here in a later 
century great St. Dunstan held the post of 
abbot and waged at his forge stern warfare 
against the Devil. And it is sober history 
that here a Christian church and brother- 
hood lived on in unbroken peace from British 
times to English. "What Glastonbury has 
to itself, alone and without rival," says Free- 
man, "is its historical position as the tie, at 
once national and religious, which binds the 
history and memories of our race to those of 
the race which we supplanted." 

The after-story of Glastonbury is as tragic 
as that of Whalley. A mitred abbey, en- 
larged and enriched from generation to gen- 
eration, it became a court whither the sons 
of noblemen and gentlemen were sent for 
nurture in gracious manners; a school of 
learning whose library was one of the most 

310 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

precious in the realm; a seat of princely 
hospitalities and lavish charities. When the 
storm burst, Abbot Whiting strove to hide 
from the spoilers some of the abbey plate. 
He was forthwith arrested at his manor of 
Sharpham — the very house where Fielding 
the novelist was afterwards born, — sen- 
tenced at Wells, dragged on a hurdle to the 
top of Glastonbury Tor, and there hanged 
and butchered, his head being spiked above 
the abbey gate. The magnificent church 
and extensive conventual buildings, stripped 
and abandoned, long served the neighbour- 
hood as a quarry. Richly sculptured blocks 
were built into barns and garden- walls and 
even broken up for making a road over the 
marshes. Little is left for the gazer now 
save a few weed- crowned columns, an ex- 
quisite Early English chapel on the site of 
St. Joseph's wattled church, a gabled tithe- 
barn, an old pilgrim inn, and the Abbot's 
Kitchen, a witchcap structure whose four 
vast fireplaces must all have roared with 
jollity when Abbot Whiting chanced to be 
entertaining five hundred "persons of 
fashion" at a single dinner-party. As we 
wandered over the daisied pastureland from 

311 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

one grey fragment to another, we realised the 
invisible Glastonbury all the more in the 
peace that has come with the perishing of 
the visible. "Time the Shadow" has but 
softened the splendour. More than ever is 
this 

"the island- valley of Avilion; 
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies 
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns 
And bowery hollows." 

It is only six miles from Glastonbury to 
Wells, one of the loveliest cathedral cities of 
England, not a place to hurry through, but 
to settle in and quietly enjoy. Lodgings in 
Vicar's Close, leisurely strolls through the 
gardens of the Bishop's Palace, hours of 
re very in choir and chapter- house and Lady 
Chapel, — it is so that one is taken to the 
heart of all this holy beauty. The founda- 
tion dates back to the beginning of the eighth 
century, but Saxon church melted into Nor- 
man, and Norman into Early English, — 
substantially the cathedral of to-day, with 
that wonderful facade of which Fuller truly 
said : "England affordeth not the like." The 
story of the city is the story of the church, and 

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SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

the story of the church is one of honour and 
untroubled peace. Not being a monastery, 
it was untouched by the blow that smote 
Glastonbury down. The rage of war has 
passed it by. Its bishops have left saintly 
memories. Above this matchless group of 
ecclesiastical buildings tender benignities 
brood like outspread wings. There is bless- 
ing in the very air. 

Wells lies in a basin at the foot of the Men- 
dip Hills, which offer tempting points for 
excursions. Our most uncanny trip was to 
Wookey Hole, where, according to a ballad in 
Percy's " Reliques," "a blear-eyed hag " used 
to dwell. A farmer, groaning with rheu- 
matism, guided us along a rocky footpath 
to the cavern entrance, where an impish boy 
met us, gave us lighted tapers and himself 
literally blazed the way with a can of some 
lurid-burning oil. After scrambling up and 
scrambling down, frequently abjured by our 
little leader to "mind yer 'eads," we left 
Hell's Ladder behind us and came out into 
an open space known as the Witch's Kitchen. 
Here was the Witch herself, a sphinx-like 
figure made by the petrifaction of the water 
dripping from the roof. She received us 

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SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

with a stolid stare, the graceless urchin threw 
a pebble at her flat nose, and we gladly 
scrambled back to upper day. 

I have a pleasanter recollection of Cox's 
Cave at Cheddar, with its clearly defined 
pillars and pinnacles, some amber, some 
olive, some transparent, some musical. It 
requires but little imagination to distinguish 
in this fantastic world the queer assortment 
of "Hindoo Temple," "Mummy," "Bat's 
Wings," "Eagle's Wings," " Loaf of Bread, " 
"Hanging Goose," "Rat running up a 
Rock," "Turkeys," "Carrots," and the 
splendid "Draperies." There is a place 
where stalagmite and stalactite nearly touch, 
— only one drop wanting, yet in all these 
years since Mr. Cox, while prosaically dig- 
ging for a coach-house, discovered this elfin 
grotto, in 1837, that drop has not crystal- 
lised, — so slow is the underground sculptor. 

All this region of the Mendip Hills, whose 
limestone cliffs rise sheer, terrace above 
terrace, is full of fascination. Traces of 
prehistoric man, as well as of extinct animal 
species, have been found in its deep caverns. 
In the Hyaena Den, when disclosed in 1852, 
the eyes of geologists could discern the very 

314 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

places where our shaggy forbears had lighted 
their fires and cooked their food. It seems 
a far cry from those low- browed cave- folk to 
Lord Macaulay, who loved this West Coun- 
try so well, and to John Locke, who was born 
in the village of Wrington, — a village which 
furthermore prides itself on one of the noblest 
church- towers in Somerset and on the de- 
corous grave of Hannah More. 

All manner of literary associations jostle 
one another in the town of Bath, to which 
at home I have heard English visitors liken 
our Boston. They meant it as a compliment, 
for Bath is a handsome city, even ranked 
by Landor, one of its most loyal residents, 
above the cities of Italy for purity and con- 
sistent dignity of architecture. To reach 
Bath we have journeyed east from the Men- 
dip Hills into the valley of the Lesser Avon. 
Here "the Queen of all the Spas" holds her 
court, the tiers of pale stone terraces and 
crescents climbing up the steep sides of the 
valley to a height of some eight hundred feet. 

Of the sights of Bath, the Abbey is most 
disappointing, and well it may be, for it was 
despoiled not only ot its glass but even of its 
iron and lead by Henry VIII, and only a 

315 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

bleak framework left to pass through a series 
of purchasers to the citizens. The west 
front wears a curious design of ladders on 
which battered angels clamber up and down. 
The interior has no "dim religious light," 
but gilt and colour and such a throng of 
gaudy monuments that the wits have made 
merry at the expense of the vaunted mineral 
springs. 

"These walls, adorned with monument and bust, 
Show how Bath waters serve to lay the dust." 

The healing quality of the waters is at- 
tributed, by the veracious Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth, to the British king Bladud, father of 
King Lear. This Bladud, being skilled in 
sorcery, placed in the gushing spring a cun- 
ning stone that made the water hot and 
curative. The wizard met an untimely end 
in a flight on wings of his own devising. He 
rode the air safely from Bath to London, 
but there fell and was dashed in pieces on the 
roof of the temple of Apollo. The Romans 
knew the virtue of these waters, and modern 
excavation has disclosed, with other rem- 
nants of a perished splendour, elaborate 
Roman baths, arched and columned and 

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SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

beautifully paved. It is so long since the 
hour when I went wandering down into 
those buried chambers that I but dimly 
recall a large central basin, where languid 
gold-fish circled in a green pool, begirt by a 
stone platform, old and mossy. This was 
set about with pilasters and capitals and all 
manner of classic fragments, among which 
were mingled bits of mediaeval carving. 
For a Saxon monastery was founded here, 
where, according to the Exeter Book, still 
stood "courts of stone," and the baths were 
known and frequented throughout the Mid- 
dle Ages and in Tudor and Stuart times. 
But the Bath of the eighteenth- century soci- 
ety-novel, the Bath of which Miss Burney 
and Miss Austen, Fielding and Smollet have 
drawn such graphic pictures, owed its being 
chiefly to Beau Nash. The city to which 
this gallant Oxonian came in 1703 was a 
mean, rough place enough. The baths were 
"unseemly ponds," open to the weather and 
to the view of the passersby, who found it 
amusing to pelt the invalid bathers with 
dead cats — poor pussies ! — and frogs. But 
Nash secured a band of music for the Pump 
Room, set orderly balls on foot, and soon 

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SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

won the title of King of Bath, which he made 
such a focus of fashion that the place grew 
during his lifetime from its poor estate into 
the comely city of to-day. This arbiter of 
elegance maintained a mimicry of royal 
pomp. His dress glistened with lace and 
embroidery and he travelled in a chaise 
drawn by six grey horses, with a full com- 
plement of outriders, footmen, and French 
horns. 

The Pump Room is worth a visit. It is 
an oblong saloon, with a semicircular recess 
at either end. At the west end is a music 
gallery, and at the east a statue of Beau Nash. 
A three- fourths square of cushioned seats 
occupies the middle of the room and opens 
toward a counter. Here a white-capped 
maid dispenses, at twopence a glass, the 
yellow fluid which hisses up hot from a 
fountain just behind her and falls murmur- 
ing into a marble vase. And all about, a 
part of the spectacle, sit the health- seekers, 
sipping the magic water from glasses in dec- 
orated saucers and looking a trifle foolish. 

Here, or in steering one's course among 
the Bath chairs that claim a native's right of 
way in park and promenade, fancy may 

318 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

choose almost any companion she will. 
Pope hated Bath, to be sure, and called it 
"the sulphurous pit," but not even Pope 
kept out of it; Beckford, the author of 
" Vathek," lived here; Butler, author of the 
"Analogy," died here; Pepys scribbled a page 
of his " Diary" here ; Herschel the astronomer 
played a chapel-organ here; Lord Chester- 
field's manners and Sheridan's wit found 
here an apt field of exercise; but for my 
part — and it was a scandalous choice, with 
the ghosts of Pitt and Burke, Wolfe and 
Nelson, Cowper and Scott and Goldsmith 
and Moore ready to do escort duty — I 
wished for the company of Chaucer's Wife 
of Bath, for such a piquant gossip could not 
have failed to add some entertaining items 
to the story of the town. 

Our final pilgrimage of last summer was 
made to Clevedon, a lonely village which 
has within half a century become a popular 
summer resort. It lies 

"By that broad water of the west," 

where the Severn merges into the Bristol Chan- 
nel. Here is Myrtle Cottage, where Coleridge 
and his bride had their brief season of joy. 

319 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

"Low was our pretty cot; our tallest rose 
Peeped at the chamber window. We could hear 
At silent noon, and eve, and early morn 
The sea's faint murmur. In the open air 
Our myrtle blossomed; and across the porch 
Thick jasmines twined." 

It was here that this poet of boundless 
promise, 

"The rapt one of the godlike forehead, 
The heaven-eyed creature," 

wrote his "iEolian Harp," his " Frost at Mid- 
night," and other lyrics touched with an un- 
wonted serenity and sweetness, and here that 
Hartley Coleridge was born. 

But our first walk took us by the beach and 
across the fields to that "obscure and soli- 
tary church" where lies Tennyson's Arthur, 
son of Henry Hallam the historian, and him- 
self a poet. He was in Vienna when 

"God's finger touch'd him and he slept," 

and Tennyson linked the Austrian and the 
English rivers in his elegy. 

"The Danube to the Severn gave 

The darken 'd heart that beat no more; 
They laid him by the pleasant shore, 
And in the hearing of the wave. 
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SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

"There twice a day the Severn fills; 
The salt sea-water passes by, 
And hushes half the babbling Wye, 
And makes a silence in the hills." 

The ancient church, now but seldom 
opened for service, was locked, and we had 
to hunt for the sexton. It was dusk when 
he arrived, but we groped our way to the 
south transept and, by the light of a lifted 
taper, made out the pathetic farewell: 

VALE DULCISSIME 
VALE DILECTISSIME 

DESIDERATISSIME 
REQUIESCAS IN PACE 

It was this tablet that haunted the restless- 
ness of Tennyson's grief as, on moonlight 
nights, he would seem to see that lustre which 
fell across his bed slipping into the transept 
window and becoming "a glory on the 
walls." 

"The marble bright in dark appears, 

As slowly steals a silver flame 

Along the letters of thy name, 

And o'er the number of thy years. 

"The mystic glory swims away; 

From off my bed the moonlight dies; 
And closing eaves of wearied eyes 
I sleep till dusk is dipt in grey: 
21 321 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

"And then I know the mist is drawn 
A lucid veil from coast to coast, 
And in the dark church like a ghost 
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn." 

From Clevedon, from Bath, from Ched- 
dar, from Wells, the roads lead to Bristol, 
which must not, if only for the sake of poor 
Chatterton, be ignored. This worn, dig- 
nified old city has had something of a va- 
grant career. Before the Norman Conquest, 
and for long after, Bristol stood north of the 
Avon and was a Gloucestershire town. In 
course of time it stretched across the river 
and lay partly in Somerset. And in the 
fourteenth century, when for wealth and 
consequence it ranked second only to Lon- 
don, Edward III created it a county by it- 
self. From the dawn of its history it was a 
trading-mart. Nothing came amiss to it, 
even kidnapping, so that among its gains it 
gained the title "Stepmother of all England. " 
The merchants and the mariners of Bristol 
stood in the front of English enterprise. 
Even in the time of Stephen it was deemed 
wellnigh the richest city of the kingdom. 
When a foreign war was in hand, Bristol 
could be counted on for a large contingent 

322 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

of ships and men. Its merchants lived in 
towered mansions, with capacious cellars 
for the storage of their goods, warehouses 
and shops on the street floor, the family 
parlours and bedrooms above, and attics for 
the prentices in the sharp- pitched gables. 
The banquet-halls, at the rear of these spa- 
cious dwellings, were splendid with carven 
roofs, rich tapestries, and plate that would 
have graced a royal board. Even the critical 
Pepys, who visited Bristol after its Spanish 
and West Indian trades were well established, 
found its quay "a most large and noble 
place." 

Bristol sailors bear no small part in the 
tales of English sea-daring and records of 
discovery. As early as 1480, Bristol mer- 
chants were sending out tall ships to search 
west of Ireland for "the Island of Brazil 
and the Seven Cities. " Sixteen years later 
the Venetian mariner, John Cabot, prob- 
ably accompanied by his son Sebastian — 
''shadow-seekers," the old Bristol tars would 
call them — had touched the coast of North 
America. On his return the "Great Ad- 
miral" clad himself in silk and was a nota- 
ble figure in the Bristol streets. Phantasmal 

323 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

though it all seems in a retrospect of cen- 
turies, many are the men who have drawn the 
gaze in these ever-moving thoroughfares, — 
William Canynges, "Merchant Royal," 
whose trade with the north of Europe prob- 
ably exceeded that of any other merchant in 
England; Thomas Norton, fifteenth- cen- 
tury alchemist and dreamer, who believed 
that he had discovered both the Philoso- 
pher's Stone and the Elixir of Life ; Captain 
Thomas James, for whom James's Bay is 
named, he whose search for the Northwest 
Passage is one of the heroic chapters in the 
annals of the sea; the Reverend Richard 
Hakluyt, always deep in talk with some 
grizzled seaman; Captain Martin Pring, 
proud of the load of sassafras he had brought 
back from Cape Cod; Colston the philan- 
thropist, the local saint. Mere literary folk 
would have been embarrassed by little enough 
attention as they went their quiet ways. 
What was Chatterton to the trading, ship- 
building, ship- lading town but a bright- eyed 
Blue- Coat boy ? And how those hard-headed 
merchants would have chuckled over the 
eager scheme of three penniless young poets, 
Coleridge, Southey, and Lovell, for founding 

324 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

a community on the Susquehanna — a river 
of melodious name and delightfully far away 
— where no one should labour more than 
two hours out of the twenty-four! 

I have been in Bristol several times, but I 
remember the workaday old city as I saw it 
first. It was September weather, and Col- 
lege Green was strewn with sallow leaves 
that flitted and whispered continually like 
memories of the past. A few fat sheep were 
in possession, together with a statue of Queen 
Victoria and a Gothic cross. On the south 
of the Green, once the burial-ground of the 
abbey, stands the cathedral, the older por- 
tion, in contrast with the new, looking black 
and rough and massy. The jewel of this 
building — which was one of the few abbey 
churches to profit by the Dissolution, in that 
Henry VIII was graciously pleased, estab- 
lishing the bishopric of Bristol, to raise it to 
cathedral rank — is its Norman chapter- 
house, a rectangular chamber wonderfully en- 
riched with stone carvings and diaper work 
and interlaced arcades. Among the bishops 
on whom the silvery lights from the Jesse 
window, the great east window of the choir, 
have fallen, are Fletcher, father of the 

325 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

dramatist, and Trelawney of Cornish fame. 
With a lingering look at the Norman arch- 
way known as College gate, whose elaborate 
mouldings are worn on the sea-wind side, 
but still distinct on the other, I crossed the 
Green to the Mayor's Chapel, a little Gothic 
church of peculiar beauty, with windows that 
are harmonies in glass, and with monuments, 
among which the burgess element is marked, so 
old and strange, yet so naive and natural, that 
the valour, love, and grief of a far past seem 
but held in slumber there. If the marble 
figures rise and talk together on All Saints' 
Eve, it is a quaint but seemly assemblage. 

Bristol, even in the palmy days of her 
rum- trade and her slave-trade, was always 
singularly given to religion, and her churches 
are numerous, — St. Peter's, her mother- 
church, with an Early Norman tower, guard- 
ing the ashes of her hapless poet, Richard 
Savage, who died, a debtor, in Newgate 
prison hard by and was buried at his jailer's 
costs; St. Stephen's, whose turreted Perpen- 
dicular tower is one of the sights of the city ; 
and many another; but supreme among 
them all, 

"The pride of Bristowe and the Western londe, " 
326 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

is St. Mary Radcliffe. This superb struct- 
ure, ever since the day when Queen Bess 
called it "the fairest, the goodliest, and most 
famous parish-church in England," has gone 
on adding praise to praise. It is of ancient 
foundation, still observing, at Whitsuntide, 
the ceremony of rush- bearing, but it was 
rebuilt, in course of the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries, by Mayor Canynges the 
grandfather and Mayor Canynges the grand- 
son. It is a pity that their alabaster heads 
should be all scratched over with initials. 
It was in this church that Chatterton pre- 
tended to discover the manuscript poems of 
his invented monk Rowley; it was here that 
Coleridge and Southey wedded the ladies of 
their Pantisocratical choice; and every good 
American is expected to thrill at the sight of 
the armour, hanging from one of the piers, of 
the gallant admiral, Sir William Penn, a native 
of Bristol and the father of our Quaker. 

On my first visit, I righteously went on 
bustop out to Clifton, the breathing- place 
of Bristol, viewed the great grassy upland, 
with the Avon flowing muddily through a 
deep gorge, paced the boasted Suspension 
Bridge that spans the gorge, and finally, by 

327 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

way of tribute to " Evelina" and "Humphrey 
Clinker," followed "the zigzag" down to the 
Hotwells, whose glory as a spa is now de- 
parted. But of all that one may see in or 
about Bristol, nothing so impresses the mind 
as the big, plain, serious old town itself. It 
has been out-distanced in commerce and in 
manufacture by those giant upstarts, Liver- 
pool and Manchester, yet it is still patiently 
pushing on in its accustomed track. So ab- 
sorbed in business routine does it seem that 
one almost forgets that it has ever had other 
than practical interests, — that the "Lyrical 
Ballads" found their publisher here, — but 
gives one's self over to the latent romance of 
commerce and of trade. One wanders 
through Corn Street and Wine Street and 
Christmas Street, by Bakers' Hall and 
Spicers' Hall and Merchant Venturers' Hall, 
and — for the tidal Avon is navigable even 
for vessels of large tonnage — is ever freshly 
astonished, as Pope was astonished, to behold 
"in the middle of the street, as far as you 
can see, hundreds of ships, their masts as 
thick as they can stand by one another, which 
is the oddest and most surprising sight 
imaginable." 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

The last great city in our summer path was 
Exeter, whose greatness is of the past. Exe- 
ter is, like Bristol, a county of itself, and yet 
stands, in a true sense, as the capital of 
Devonshire. It is, moreover, the heart of 
the whole West Country. "In Exeter," says 
Mr. Norway, a Cornishman, "all the history 
of the West is bound up — its love of liberty, 
its independence, its passionate resistance to 
foreign conquerors, its devotion to lost causes, 
its loyalty to the throne, its pride, its trade, 
its maritime adventure, — all these many 
strands are twined together in that bond 
which links West Countrymen to Exeter. 
There is no incident in their past history 
which does not touch her. Like them she was 
unstained by heathendom, and kept her faith 
when the dwellers in less happy cities further 
north were pricked to the worship of Thor 
and Odin at the point of Saxon spears. Like 
them she fought valiantly against the Norman 
Conqueror, and when she fell their cause 
fell with her. And since those days what a 
host of great and stirring incidents have hap- 
pened here, from Perkin Warbeck beating 
on the gates with his rabble of brave Cor- 
nishmen, to William of Orange going in high 

329 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

state to the cathedral, welcomed already as 
a deliverer to that throne which it lay almost 
with Exeter to give or to withhold." 

Exeter impresses the stranger to-day merely 
as a prosperous county- town, a pleasant 
cathedral city, yet in the reign of Stephen it 
was ranked for importance next after Lon- 
don, York, and Winchester, supplanting Lin- 
coln, once the holder of the fourth place, 
from which it was soon itself to be dislodged 
by Bristol. But Exeter, seated on the hill 
where, in dim, wild ages a band of Britons 
built them a rude stronghold, beside the 
stream up whose reddened waters the vessels 
of Roman and Saxon and Dane have fought 
their way, does not forget. So faithful is her 
memory, indeed, that still the vicar of Pinhoe, 
a village almost in her suburbs, receives every 
year a handful of shining silver pieces in 
recognition of a deed of daring performed by 
a long-ago predecessor in his holy office. 
When the West Countrymen, bent on driv- 
ing out the Danes, were in the thick of a hard 
fight there at Pinhoe, their supply of arrows 
fell short, and this plucky priest, girding up 
his gown, dodged through the enemy to the 
citadel, bringing back — so schoolboyish were 

330 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

those old battles — a bundle of feathered 
shafts that might have saved the day. But 
although the Danes triumphed, Exeter has 
paid an annual reward of sixteen shillings 
to the vicar of Pinhoe ever since — a period 
of some nine hundred years. 

We rendered, of course, our first homage 
to the cathedral, rejoicing in the oft- praised 
symmetries of the interior and, hardly less, 
in the tender colour- tones that melted, blues 
into greys, and fawns into creams, with the 
softening of the light. The cathedral library 
contains that treasure of our literature, the 
Exeter Book, an anthology of Anglo-Saxon 
poetry, "one great English book of divers 
things, song- wise wrought," left by the will 
of Bishop Leofric, who died in 1072, to "Saint 
Peter's minster in Exeter where his bishop- 
stool is." Miles Coverdale, translator of the 
Bible, was bishop here in Tudor times, and 
Sir Jonathan Trelawney, transferred from 
the poorer see of Bristol, held for eighteen 
years Exeter's episcopal throne, — a "bishop- 
stool" most magnificently fashioned. This 
Trelawney was one of the "Seven Bishops" 
who clashed with James II and were thrown 
into prison. His home was in Cornwall, 

331 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

and the famous song, which may owe its 
present form to the Rev. R. S. Hawker, the 
eccentric vicar of Morwenstow, thunders the 
wrath of the West Country: 

"And have they fixed the where and when? 
And shall Trelawney die ? 
Here's twenty thousand Cornishmen 
Will know the reason why." 

And speaking of vicars, the most hurried 
tourist should cast a glance up to the red 
tower of St. Thomas' church, for the sake of 
another clergyman who dared brave a king. 
The vicar of St. Thomas was conspicuous 
in the West Country rebellion against the re- 
formed service, involving the use of an Eng- 
lish prayer-book, introduced by law in 1549. 
The men of Devon and, even more, the men of 
Cornwall, who understood the English hardly 
better than the Latin, looked upon this new 
form of worship as "but a Christmas game" 
and could not "abide to hear of any other 
religion than as they were first nuzled in." 
This Exeter vicar went on chanting the Latin 
liturgy and wearing his old vestments, so 
that, for his contumacy, he was hanged "in 
his popish apparel" from a gallows erected 
on top of his own church- tower. 

332 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

Of the secular buildings in Exeter, we 
visited the fine-fronted guildhall in High 
Street and Mol's Coffee House in the Cathe- 
dral Yard. The custodian of the guildhall 
proudly pointed out the beauties of its fif- 
teenth-century carvings, and hospitably in- 
vited us to try on the gorgeous robes of the 
civic dignitaries and sit in their great chairs 
of fretted oak, but we contented ourselves 
with viewing the various treasures of the old 
burgh on exhibition there, — gold chains of 
office, silver salvers and loving-cups, a huge, 
two-handed sword that long since drank its 
last draught of blood in the fierce grip of 
Edward IV, a portrait of the Stuart princess 
who, when Charles I and Queen Henrietta 
were in sore straits, had been born and shel- 
tered at Exeter, and many another memento 
of an eventful and honourable past. We 
went away rapt in visions of those blithe 
Midsummer Eves when all the Exeter guilds, 
preceded by a mounted band consisting of 
Mayor and Alderman and Council, made 
the circuit of the city walls, the image of St. 
Peter borne before the Fishmongers, that of 
St. Luke before the Painters, and every other 
trade in like manner preceded by its especial 

333 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

patron saint; but Mol's Coffee House called 
up a later picture of 

"Sir Francis Drake, and Martin Frobisher, 
John Hawkins, and your other English captains," 

who, with their Devonshire countrymen, Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Richard Grenville, 
Sir Walter Raleigh, used to meet in the oak- 
panelled hall of this Tudor mansion for such 
high, adventurous talk as must have made 
the wine sparkle in their cups. 

We were a little tired in Exeter, I remem- 
ber, but instead of prying out from the west 
wall of the cathedral, as we would have done 
three hundred years ago, a bit of "Peter- 
stone" to cure our ailments, we took a bliss- 
ful drive up the Exe, — such a trickle of a 
stream just then that only regard for the 
coachman's feelings restrained us from mak- 
ing fun of it, — through the tranquil beauty 
of Devonshire lanes, by thatched cottage 
and lordly park and one dreamy little church 
after another, each with its special feature of 
pinnacled tower, or Saxon font, or quaint old 
pew, or frieze of angel frescoes. We passed 
a modest almshouse, perhaps the bequest of 
husband and wife for the maintenance of 

334 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

four widows or two married couples. At all 
events, the inscription beneath a portrait 
head in relief ran: 

"Grudge not my laurell. 
Rather blesse that Power 
Which made the death of two 
The life of fowre." 

Every mile of Devonshire has its charm, 
not to be mapped out in advance, but freshly 
discovered by each new lover of the moorland 
and the sea, of soft air and the play of shadows, 
of folklore and tradition, of the memory of 
heroes. Those who cannot know fair Devon 
in actual presence may find her at her best 
in the romances of Kingsley and Blackmore 
and Phillpotts. The shire abounds in sea- 
magic. The south coast, with its wealth of 
sheltered bays and tempting inlets, has so 
mild and equable a climate that its dreamy 
windings have become dotted with winter 
resorts as well as watering-places. Lyme 
Regis, on the edge of Dorset, Sidmouth and 
Exmouth and Dawlish, Teignmouth, whence 
Keats dated his "Endymion," and fashion- 
able Torquay are perhaps the most in favour, 
but all the shore is warm and wonderful in 
colour, set as it is with wave- washed cliffs 

335 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

that glisten ruddy and white and rose- pink 
in the sun. These shining headlands, about 
which beat the wild white wings of seagulls, 
are haunted by legends wilder yet. Half- 
way between Dawlish and Teignmouth are 
two red sandstone pillars, the statelier with 
its top suggestive of a tumbled wig, the lower 
standing at a deferential tilt. In these are 
shut the sinful souls of an East Devon clergy- 
man and his clerk, who longed too eagerly, 
in the hope of their own preferment, for the 
death of a Bishop of Exeter. 

Further down the coast the health seekers 
and holiday folk are somewhat less in evi- 
dence. The old, cliff- climbing town of Brix- 
ham, where William of Orange landed, goes 
fishing for a livelihood. Dartmouth, not so 
joyous to-day as when Cceur de Lion gath- 
ered there the fleet that was to win for Chris- 
tendom the Holy Sepulchre, not so turbulent 
as when Chaucer suspected his wild- bearded 
seaman, little better than a pirate, of hailing 
from that port, not so adventurous as when 
one John Davis, of Sandridge on the Dart, 
sailed out from her blue harbour with his 
two small vessels, the Sunneshine and the 
Moonshine, to seek a passage to China by 

336 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

way of the Polar sea, is mainly occupied in 
the training of midshipmen. A steamer 
trip up the Dart, that sudden and dangerous 
stream of neighbourhood dread 

— "River of Dart, river of Dart, 

Every year thou claimest a heart" — 

brings us to Totnes, where, on the high au- 
thority of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the first 
king of the Britons, Brutus, grandson of the 
pious iEneas, made his landing. 

"Here I am, and here I res', 
And this town shall be called Totnes." 

The Brutus Stone, on which the Trojan 
first set foot, is shown in irrefutable proof of 
this event. In the course of the trip, the 
steamer passes Greenway House, where Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert was born and where, it 
is claimed, the potato first sprouted in Eng- 
lish soil. 

But the most momentous of all these 
southern ports, Plymouth, wears an aspect 
worthy of its renown. The spell of the briar- 
rose has not choked its growth, although the 
glamour of a glorious past enhances its 

present greatness. As we gazed from Ply- 
22 337 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

mouth Hoe, a lofty crescent on the sea-front, 
with a magnificent outlook across the long 
granite break- water and the Sound alive 
with all manner of shipping, past the Eddy- 
stone Light to the Atlantic, our thoughts, 
even while recognising the prosperity of this 
modern naval station, flew back to those 
brave old times when the steep streets and 
the high bluff rang not only with the gruff 
hails of bronzed sea-captains, 

"dogs of an elder day 
Who sacked the golden ports," 

but with the merry quips and laughter of the 
gay young blades who loved to ruffle it before 
the Devon belles. 

"How Plymouth swells with gallants! how the streets 
Glister with gold! You cannot meet a man 
But trikt in scarf and feather." 

Sumptuous ocean liners call at Plymouth 
now; the terrible war- ships of England ride 
that ample roadstead ; but we remembered 
the gallant little crafts of yore, the Dread- 
nought and the Defiance, the Swiftsure, the 
Lion, the Rainbow, the Nonpareil, the Peli- 
can, the Victory, and the Elizabeth. It was 
from Plymouth that Drake, "fellow- traveller 

338 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

of the Sunn," put forth on the voyage that 
circumnavigated the globe, and here he was 
playing at bowls when on the Hoe was raised 
the cry that the Spanish Armada had been 
sighted. But not all the galleons of Spain 
could flurry "Franky Drake." 

"Drake nor devil nor Spaniard feared; 

Their cities he put to the sack; 
He singed His Catholic Majesty's beard, 

And harried his ships to wrack. 
He was playing at Plymouth a rubber of bowls 

When the great Armada came, 
But he said, 'They must wait their turn, good souls;' 

And he stooped and finished the game." 

His statue presides over the broad esplan- 
ade, looking steadily seaward, — a sight that 
put us again to quoting Newbolt: 

"Drake, he's in his hammock an' a thousand mile away, 

(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below ?) 
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay, 

An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. 
Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the ships, 

Wi' sailor lads a-dancin' heel-an'-toe, 
An' the shore-lights flashin', an' the night-tide dashin', 

He sees it arl so plainly as he saw et long ago. 

"Drake he was a Devon man, an' ruled the Devon seas, 
(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below ?) 
Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease, 
An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. 
339 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

'Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore, 
Strike et when your powder's runnin' low; 

If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven, 
An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them 
long ago.'" 

It is hard to put by those visions of the 
Armada days even to think of Sir Walter 
Raleigh's tragic return to Plymouth and the 
block, his high heart foiled at last in its long 
quest for the golden city of Manoa; and I 
hardly dare confess that we quite forgot to 
hunt out the special nook whence the May- 
flower, with her incredible load of furniture 
and ancestors, set sail to found another 
Plymouth on a bleaker shore. 

The northern coast of Devonshire, with its 
more bracing air, is no less enchanting than 
the southern. Charles Kingsley, born under 
the brow of Dartmoor, has lavished on North 
Devon raptures of filial praise, but the scenes 
of "Westward Ho !" fully bear out his glowing 
paragraphs. It is years ago that I passed 
an August in Clovelly, but the joy of it lingers 
yet. Nothing that I have ever seen on this 
our starry lodging- place, with its infinite 
surprises of beauty, resembles that white 
village climbing the cleft of a wooded cliff, 

340 













I ' 








mm? 














J M 












m 





SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

its narrow street only a curving slope, a steep 
passage here and there smoothed into steps, 
where donkeys and pedestrians rub amiable 
shoulders. At a turn in this cobbled stair- 
way, your gaze, which has been held between 
two lines of the quaintest little houses, all 
diversified with peaks and gables, porches 
and balconies, window displays of china and 
pots of flowering vines, suddenly falls to a tiny 
harbour, a pier built out from the natural 
rock and hung with fishing-nets, a tangle of 
red-sailed boats, and a pebbly beach from 
which we used to watch the sunset flushing 
sea and cliffs. The five hundred dwellers 
in this hanging hamlet must all be of a kin, 
for Clovelly lads, we were told by our land- 
lady, never do well if they marry outside 
the combe. Kindest of gossips ! She tucked 
us away as best she could in such bits of 
rooms that, like Alice in Wonderland, we 
had to thrust one foot up chimney and one 
arm out of the window a*aiong the fuchsias 
and geraniums that make nothing, in Clov- 
elly, of growing to a height of twenty feet. 
She would put us up wonderful luncheons of 
duck sandwiches and heather-honey and 
lime-water delicately flavoured from the old 

341 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

whiskey bottles into which it was poured, 
when we were starting out on those long 
walks to which North Devon air and views 
allure the laziest. Sometimes we followed 
the Hobby Drive, a wooded avenue along the 
top of the cliff, where for considerable dis- 
tances a wall of noble timber, beech and oak 
and chestnut, glistening hollies and red- 
berried rowans, would shut out the view, and 
again the foliage would open and the eye 
could range across an opal sea to Lundy 
Island. On other days we would stroll 
through Clovelly Court to the summit of 
White Cliff, known as Gallantry Bower, 
whence one may look at choice far out over 
blowing woods or tossing waves. The tow- 
ering trees of the park, trees that Will Carey 
may have climbed, are so ancient now that 
ferns and mosses grow on their decaying 
branches. Once we picked our way over 
the shingles to Bucks Mill, gathering only to 
drop again handfuls of the curiously flecked 
and banded pebbles. The water seemed to 
have as many colours as they, tans and rus- 
sets and copper- tints innumerable, with shift- 
ing gleams of turquoise and of beryl. Bucks 
Mill is a fishing-hamlet of some one hundred 

342 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

and fifty souls, representing two original fami- 
lies, one of which, "the Browns," a swarthy 
and passionate race, is said to descend from 
Spanish sailors wrecked off the coast when 
gale and billow sided with England against 
the hapless Armada. 

Another day we walked to Stoke, seven 
miles thither and seven miles back, to see the 
Saxon church raised by the Countess Elgitha 
in gratitude for the escape from shipwreck 
of her husband, Earl Godwin. All the way 
we were passing cottages that seemed to have 
strayed out of an artist's portfolio. Their 
rosy walls of Devonshire cob — the reddish 
mud of the region mixed with pebbles — 
were more than half hidden by the giant 
fuchsias and clambering honeysuckles. Even 
the blue larkspur would grow up to the thatch. 
Too often our road was shut in by hedges 
and we trudged along as in a green tunnel 
roofed with blue. Dahlias and hydrangias, 
poppies, hollyhocks and roses filled the cot- 
tage dooryards and gardens with masses of 
bloom. We asked a woman smiling in her 
vine- wreathed doorway how near we were to 
Hartland. "Win the top of yon hill," she 
said, "and you'll soon slip away into it," 

343 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

So we slipped away and were refreshed in 
another cottage doorway by two glasses of 
skim-milk for a penny. We found a grave 
old church at Stoke, with legions of rooks 
wheeling about the massive tower which has 
so long been a beacon for storm- tossed mari- 
ners. The white- bearded verger, whose roll- 
ing gait betrayed the sailor, read to us in 
stentorian tones, punctuated with chuckles, 
an epitaph which, in slightly varied form, 
we had seen elsewhere in Devon: 

"Here lies I at the church door. 
Here lies I because I's poor. 
The farther in, the more to pay; 
But here lies I as well as they." 

Our homeward walk, by a different road, 
gave us a clearer impression of the ranges of 
naked hilltops which make up the Hartland 
parish. Upon those rounded summits rested 
a mellow western light which had dimmed 
into dusk when we finally risked our weary 
bones on the slippery "back staircase" of 
Clovelly. 

We journeyed from Clovelly to Bideford by 
carrier's cart, sitting up with what dignity 
we could amidst a remarkable miscellany 

344 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

of packages. Once arrived at Kingsley's 
hero- town, we read, as in honour bound, the 
opening chapter of "Westward Ho!" crossed 
the historic bridge and sought out in the 
church the brass erected to the noble memory 
of Sir Richard Grenville, who drove the 
little Revenge with such a gallant recklessness 
into the thick of the Spanish fleet, fought his 
immortal fight, and died of his wounds "with 
a joyful and quiet mind." The exceeding 
charm of this Bristol Channel coast made us 
intolerant of trains and even of coaches, so 
that at lovely, idle Ilfracombe we took to our 
feet again and walked on by a cliff path to 
Combe Martin. Here we were startled, on 
going to bed, to find packed away between 
the thin mattresses a hoard of green pears, 
hard as marbles, and not much bigger, which 
the small boy of the inn, apparently intent 
on suicide, had secreted. The towered 
church, some eight or nine centuries old, was 
shown to us by a sexton who claimed that the 
office had descended in his family from father 
to son for the past three hundred years. 
However that may be, he was an entertain- 
ing guide, reading off his favourite "posy- 
stones" with a relish, and interpreting the 

345 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

carvings of the curious old rood-screen ac- 
cording to a version of Scripture unlike any 
that we had known before. Thence our way 
climbed up for two toilsome miles through a 
muddy sunken lane, in whose rock walls was 
a growth of dainty fern. It was good to 
come out in view of the rival purples of sunny 
sea and heathery hills, good to be regaled 
on "cold shoulder" and Devonshire junket 
in a stone- floored kitchen with vast fireplace 
and ponderous oaken settles, good to start 
off again across Trentishoe Common, glori- 
ous with gorse, and down the richly wooded 
combe, past a farmyard whose great black 
pig grunted at us fearsomely, and still down 
and down, through the fragrance of the pines. 
We turned off our track to follow the eddying 
Heddon to the sea, and had, in consequence, 
a stiff scramble to gain our proper path cut 
high in the Channel side of the cliff. We 
walked along that narrow way in a beauty 
almost too great to bear, but the stress of 
emotion found some relief in the attention 
we had to give to our footing, for the cliff fell 
sheer to the sunset- coloured waters. We 
spent the night at Wooda Bay, walking on in 
the morning for a jocund mile or two through 

346 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

fresh- scented larchwoods, then across Lee 
Abbey Park and through the fantastic Valley 
of Rocks, along another cliff- walk and down 
a steep descent to Lynmouth, where Shelley's 
"myrtle- twined cottage" stands upon the 
beach. Lynmouth, where the songs of sea 
and river blend, was more to our taste in its 
picturesque mingling of the old and the new, 
of herring-village and watering-place, than 
its airy twin, Linton, perched on the cliff- top 
four hundred feet above, but both are little 
paradises and, having located ourselves in 
one, the first thing we did was to leave it and 
visit the other. We lingered for a little in 
this exquisite corner of creation, till one 
blithe morning we could put up no longer 
with the saucy challenge of the Lyn and 
chased that somersaulting sprite, that per- 
petual waterfall, five miles inland, so coming 
out on the heathery waste of Exmoor. 

We would gladly have turned gipsies then 
and there, if so we might have wandered all 
over and over that beautiful wild upland, 
and down through the undulating plain of 
mid-Devon, with its well-watered pastures 
and rich dairy-farms for whose butter and 
cheese the Devonshire sailors, as Hakluyt's 

347 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

narratives tell, used to long sorely on their 
far voyages. But the genuine garden of 
Devon is South Hams, below Dartmoor and 
between the Teign and the Tamar. This is 
the apple- country of which the poet sings : 

"For me there's nought I would not give 
For the good Devon land, 
Whose orchards down the echoing cleeve 

Bedewed with spray-drift stand, 
And hardly bear the red fruit up 
That shall be next year's cider-cup." 

Little as Parson Herrick, the indignant 
incumbent of Dean Prior, enjoyed his Devon- 
shire charge, the cider industry of the region 
must have appealed to him. 

But this broad county, outranked in size 
only by York and Lincolnshire, has in its 
south, as in its north, a desolate tableland. 
Dartmoor has been described as a "mon- 
strous lump of granite, covered with a peaty 
soil." The rocks are rich in lead and iron, 
tin and copper, but the soil is too poor even 
for furze to flourish in it. Heather, reeds, 
moss and whortleberries make shift to grow, 
and afford a rough pasturage to the scam- 
pering wild ponies, the moor-sheep and red 
cattle. It is a silent land of rugged tors and 

348 



SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 

black morasses, of sudden mists and glooms, 
of prehistoric huts, abandoned mines, and, 
above all, for "Superstition clings to the 
granite," of dark stories, weird spells, and 
strange enchantments. Indeed, it folds a 
horror in its heart, — ■ Dartmoor Prison, 
where our American sailors suffered a cen- 
tury ago, and where English convicts are now 
ringed in by grim walls and armed sentries. 
It is said that even to-day, when a Dartmoor 
child gets a burn, the mother's first remedy 
is to lay her thumb upon the smarting spot 
and repeat: 

"There came two angels out of the west, 
One brought fire, the other brought frost. 

Out, fire! In, frost! 
By the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost! 

Amen, amen, amen." 

Among the mysterious groups of so-called 
Druid stones is a circle known as the Nine 
Maidens, for these uncouth grey shapes were 
once slender girls so fond of dancing that they 
would not cease on Sunday, and for that 
sin were petrified. And still every Sabbath 
noon these impenitent stones come to life and 
dance thrice around in a circle. 



349 



CORNWALL 

BUT the veritable Pixydom lies south of 
the Tamar. In Cornwall, that stretch 
of deserted moors furrowed on either 
side by little river- valleys, that rocky prom- 
ontory which seems to belong more to 
the kingdom of the sea than to England, 
the Celtic imagination has rioted at will. 
There were giants in the land in bygone 
days, for the wanderer among those strangely 
sculptured crags of granite, slate, and serpen- 
tine chances at every turn on a Giant's Cradle 
or a Giant's Chair, Giant's Spoon, Giant's 
Bowl, Giant's Key, Giant's Hat, Giant's 
Table, Giant's Well, Giant's Pulpit, 
Giant's Grave. Cornishmen have heard the 
music and seen the fairy dances, spied 
on fairy banquets, and peeped in on fairy 
funerals. The Small People have been gay 
and kindly neighbours, sometimes whisk- 
ing away a neglected baby and returning the 
little mortal all pink and clean, wrapped in 

350 



CORNWALL 

leaves and blossoms, "as sweet as a nut." 
These are the spirits of Druids, or of other 
early Cornwall folk, who, as heathen, may 
not go to heaven, but are too innocent for hell. 
So they are suffered to live on in their old 
happy haunts, but ever dwindling and dwind- 
ling, till it is to be feared that bye and bye, 
what with all the children growing stupid over 
schoolbooks, and all the poets writing realistic 
novels, the Small People will twinkle out of 
sight. The Spriggans, lurking about the 
cairns and cromlechs, where they keep guard 
over buried treasures, could better be spared. 
They are such thievish and mischievous trolls, 
with such extraordinary strength in their ugly 
bits of bodies, it is more likely they are the 
diminished ghosts of the old giants. The 
Piskies are nearly as bad, as any bewildered 
traveller who has been Pisky-led into a bog 
would testify. The only sure protection 
against their tricks is to wear your garments 
inside out. Many a Cornish farmer has 
found a fine young horse all sweated and spent 
in the morning, his mane knotted into fairy 
stirrups showing plainly how some score of 
the Piskies had been riding him over night. 
And many a Cornish miner, deep down in the 

351 



CORNWALL 

earth, has felt his hair rise on his head as he 
heard the tap, tap, tap of the Knockers, souls 
of long- imprisoned Jews sent here by Roman 
emperors to work the tin-mines of Cornwall. 
The Brownies, who used to be so helpful 
about the house, have grown shy of late and 
can be depended on for assistance only when 
the bees are swarming. Then the housewife 
beats on a tin pan, calling at the top of her 
voice: "Brownie! Brownie!" till she sees 
that he has heard her and is persuading the 
bees to settle. Offended mermaids have 
choked up Cornish harbours and buried sea- 
coast villages under sand. If you doubt it, 
go and look at the little church of St. Piran — 
the miners' saint, who came sailing from Ire- 
land on a millstone and discovered the Cor- 
nish tin — the church that for seven centuries 
was hidden under the sands and then, as the 
restless winds sifted and searched them, rose 
again to human sight. Spectral hounds bay 
across the moors, and a phantom coach is 
sometimes heard rolling with a hollow rumble 
along the deep-hedged roads. Ghost ships 
with all sail set drive by the shores on gusty 
nights, and the Death Ship, tall, dark, square- 
rigged, with black sails and a demon crew, has 

352 



CORNWALL 

been known to come, in crashes of thunder 
and flare of lightning, for the soul of a noto- 
rious wrecker. Drowned sailors call from 
under the tide or speed along the strand with 
dripping clothes and hair. Witches, sor- 
cerers, fortune-tellers, charmers and "cun- 
ning men" are among the historic characters 
of Cornwall. In fact, the Witch of Freddam 
still rides the seas in her coffin, stirring up 
storms with her ladle and broom. The luck- 
less sailor who has set eyes on her will not see 
his home again. Miners, too, have their 
special dangers. The goblins that they some- 
times chance on underground, hunched up 
into uncouth shapes or tumbling heels over 
head, are not ill-met, as their presence indi- 
cates rich lodes, but it would never do to 
mark a cross on the wall of a mine gallery, 
or to pass a snail on your way to the shaft 
without dropping for it a morsel of tallow 
from your candle. The newly dead notify 
their friends of the event in many a curious 
fashion, even by shaking the milk in the pans 
and spoiling the clotted cream. A woman 
shamed to suicide haunts her betrayer in the 
form of a white hare. Cornishmen cannot 
die easy on a feather-bed, nor in a house 
23 353 



CORNWALL 

where any key is turned or bolt is shot, nor 
would they be carried to the grave by a new 
road, nor buried on the north side of the 
church. If rain fall — as in Cornwall it 
often does — on a bier, it is a sign that the 
soul has "arrived safe." 

Amid all these supernatural influences, it 
is reassuring to know that the Devil never 
enters this county, having a wholesome fear 
of being made into a pie. His cloven hoofs 
once ventured across the Tamar, but he was 
dismayed to find that the Cornish women 
put everything, fish, flesh, fowl, vegetables, 
whatnot, into pie. By the time poor Beelze- 
bub had partaken of fishy pie, stargazy pie 
— made of pilchards, — conger pie — made 
of eels, — lamy pie — made of kid, — herby 
pie, parsley pie, and piggy pie, his nerves 
gave way, and he bolted out of the shire so 
precipitately that he strewed the hills and 
the coast with his travelling equipment of 
Devil's Bellows, Devil's Ovens, and Devil's 
Frying-pans. 

It is mainly in West Cornwall that such 
fantastic figurings in the rocks are referred 
to the Devil or the giants. On the eastern 
moors they are more commonly attributed to 

354 



CORNWALL 

King Arthur, whose Beds and Chairs and 
Cups and Saucers and the Footprints of 
whose horse are numerous enough to put the 
skeptic out of countenance. But not only 
our first encounter, as we entered Cornwall 
by the east, was with King Arthur, but almost 
our last, as we left the Duchy by the west, — 
for this shire is proud to be known as the 
Royal Duchy, claiming that the eldest son of 
the Crown is born Duke of Cornwall and 
only subsequently created Prince of Wales. 
Within what seemed but a short time after 
crossing the broad boundary stream, dotted 
with sleepy craft, we found ourselves at Lis- 
keard, a sleepy old market- town blest with 
a noble church on whose outer wall is a sun- 
dial with the grave motto: "So soon passeth 
it away." It was already late in the after- 
noon, but a dark, thin, bright- eyed Cornish- 
woman in the railway carriage had given us 
most cheering information. Could we drive 
to Dozmare Pool before sunset? Easily; it 
was only a round of three or four miles and 
would take us by the Devil's Cheesewring 
and The Hurlers and St. Keyne's Well. The 
waters of this well, she went on to tell us, have 
the magic property of giving the upper hand 

355 



CORNWALL 

to that one of a wedded pair first drinking of 
them after the ceremony; and she recited 
with charming vivacity snatches of Southey's 
ballad, while a burly, red-faced, blue-eyed, 
beaming tourist from over the Tamar, the 
only man in the compartment, blurted out 
a gallantry to the effect that ladies ought to 
have their way anyhow, wells or no wells, 
and his silent little wife smiled a knowing 
little smile. 

The people at the inn exchanged glances 
when we announced our route and although, 
setting out at five, we confidently ordered 
dinner at seven, the landlady slipped a packet 
of sandwiches and two bottles of ginger ale 
into the carriage. The coachman, thin and 
dark and vivid of countenance, like all the 
rest of this new Cornish world about us, 
kindly but firmly refused to include in the 
drive St. Keyne's Well, the Cheesewring, a 
curious pile of granite blocks some thirty feet 
high, whose topmost stone is so sensitive that 
it whirls about three times whenever it hears 
a cock crow, and The Hurlers, three pre- 
historic stone circles reported by legend, in 
its later Puritan garb, to be groups of young 
Cornishmen thus enchanted for indulging 

356 



CORNWALL 

on a Sunday in the traditional Cornish sport 
of "hurling." Dozmare Pool was all that 
our determined Jehu would undertake, al- 
though he graciously allowed us, in passing, 
a glimpse of St. Cleer's Well. This is not as 
famous as the well of St. Neot the Pigmy, 
who endowed the sacred waters with miracu- 
lous virtue by standing in them, day after day, 
immersed to his neck, while he repeated the 
entire book of Psalms, or of various others, 
but it is a spring of old renown, covered over 
by a steep- pitched roof supported on time- 
worn pillars and arches. The niches of this 
little open-air baptistry are now empty and 
its pinnacles are broken, but beside it still 
stands an ancient cross. The lofty- towered 
church of St. Cleer was close by, and we en- 
tered to bow our heads for a moment under 
its vaulted and timbered roof. 

Our coachman would allow no further 
pause. The sunset was already casting a 
crimson light over the wastes of fern and 
bracken and the earthscars of abandoned 
mines, for the hills all about contain tin and 
copper, which it does not pay to work. Our 
old white nag — I hope his name was Merlin 
— seemed incapable of fatigue. I half sus- 

357 



CORNWALL 

pect he was a sorcery steed of metal. Up and 
down the hills he scrambled with unquench- 
able enthusiasm. As the sun sank into a bed 
of bracken, we marvelled that the driver could 
be sure of his way across those dim and fea- 
tureless moors, but he turned unerringly 
from one deep lane into another. As we 
drew nearer the Pool, that "middle mere" 
into which Sir Bedivere flung the jewel-hilted 
Excalibur, the evil powers began to array 
themselves against us. For the wild spirit 
Tregeagle, whose howling as he is chased by 
demon dogs has been heard all over Cornwall, 
is doomed for his sins in this mortal life to 
labour endlessly at the hopeless task of empty- 
ing Dozmare Pool. It is so deep — notwith- 
standing the awkward fact of its going dry 
in rainless summers — that not all the bell- 
ropes in Cornwall can reach to its bottom, 
and a thorn-bush, once flung into it, floated 
out into Falmouth harbour. The bailing 
must be done by a limpetshell with a hole in 
it and, altogether, it is no wonder that Tre- 
geagle's temper has grown exceedingly 
morose. For change of occupation, he is 
sometimes taken to the north coast and set 
to spinning ropes of sand, or is given a 

358 



CORNWALL 

choked-up harbour to sweep out, but these 
tasks please him no better, and the shrieks 
of his torment are borne on every storm. 

As we drove on, a light mist crept over the 
meadows and defined the course of an attend- 
ant stream. Clouds and trees took on weird 
aspects. There were Druid robes floating 
across the sky, misshapen figures crouching 
under the hedges, menacing arms shaken from 
the trees, and one wizard branch shot out and 
splashed our faces with unholy dew. The 
mist thickened and rose. The carriage left 
the road and bumped uncertainly along till 
it came to a stop at what we vaguely made 
out to be the foot of a hill. For by this time 
the clinging vapours had driven us into our 
waterproofs and so blurred all vision that 
the driver, who could not leave his fiery vet- 
eran of a horse, would not let us attempt the 
half-mile climb alone, but sent a shout 
plunging through that wet, white air and 
brought out some bogie of the moor em- 
bodied as a gaunt old Cornish dame to be 
our guide. Feeling her way with a stout 
stick, she led us up the hill and along a stony 
track where we could not see our steps nor 
one another's faces. When she stayed us 

359 



• CORNWALL 

with her staff and said we had reached the 
pool, we could discern nothing of the sort, 
but reckless of life and limb we followed her 
down an abrupt bank and over a hummocky 
bit of ground to the very brink, as she assured 
us, of the bottomless tarn. We tried to think 
we saw a glimmer, although we heard not 
even 

"the ripple washing in the reeds, 
And the wild water lapping on the crag." 

Lacking an Excalibur, I cast a stone into 
the invisible, hoping I might hit Tregeagle, 
but the hollow splash that came back aroused 
such uncanny echoes we all three with one 
accord skurried away and scrabbled back 
down sandy ruts to the haven of the carriage. 
As we gratefully munched our sandwiches, 
we reflected that perhaps the mystical mere 
was more impressive so than if we had actu- 
ally beheld that little fresh- water pond, about 
a mile in circumference and some eight or 
ten feet deep, lying on its mid- Cornwall 
tableland with the crest of Brown Gilly ris- 
ing up behind. Our eyes had told us noth- 
ing that we could urge against Malory's 
geography, with its sea-route from Dozmare 
to Glastonbury. 

360 




CHURCH OF ST. COLUMB MINOR 



CORNWALL 

"Then Sir Bedivere took the King upon his back, 
and so went with him to that water side, and when 
they were at the water side, even fast by the bank hoved 
a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among 
them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, 
and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King 
Arthur. 'Now put me into the barge,' said the King; 
and so he did softly. And there received him three 
queens with great mourning, and so they sat them 
down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his 
head, and then that queen said, 'Ah, dear brother, 
why have ye tarried so long from me? Alas; this 
wound on your head hath caught overmuch cold.' And 
so then they rowed from the land, and Sir Bedivere 
cried, 'Ah, my lord Arthur, what shall become of me, 
now ye go from me and leave me here alone among 
mine enemies?' 'Comfort thyself,' said the King, 
' and do as well as thou mayst, for in me is no trust for 
to trust in. For I will into the vale of Avalon to heal 
me of my grievous wound. ' " 

But the Cornish mist in which Arthur 
fought his last "dim, weird battle of the west " 
was to us no longer a fable. 

"A death-white mist slept over sand and sea; 
Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew 
Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold 
With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell 
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. 
For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, 
And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; 
361 



CORNWALL 

And some had visions out of golden youth, 
And some beheld the faces of old ghosts 
Look in upon the battle." 

Now that we had braved Tregeagle and 
done the deed, that heavy mist thinned away 
as suddenly as it had gathered, and when, 
at ten o'clock, we reached our inn, the sky 
was bright with stars, and a great moon was 
slowly drifting up from the horizon. 

But the paramount Table Round locality 
in Cornwall is Tintagel on the western coast 
where Arthur's Castle stands and where, 
moreover, the hushed tide brought him first 
from the mystery of "the great deep." 

"For there was no man knew from whence he came; 
But after tempest, when the long wave broke 
All down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss, 
There came a day as still as heaven, and then 
They found a naked child upon the sands 
Of wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea; 
And that was Arthur." 

The high, bleak, rugged and desolate tract 
of Bodwin Moor, at whose heart is Dozmare 
Pool, lies between the four towns of Lis- 
keard, Bodwin, Launceston and Camelford. 
This last was our starting-point for Tintagel. 
We had reached Camelford by a day's jour- 

362 



CORNWALL 

ney from Penzance, setting out by train 
through a country seamed all over with 
abandoned surface diggings of the tin mines, 
pierced by shafts and defaced by heaps of 
mineral refuse to which heather was already 
bringing the first healing of nature. We had 
our nooning at Newquay and would have 
been glad to linger on its broad beach, look- 
ing up at the twin barrows where sleep, ac- 
cording to tradition, two kings of long ago, — 
kings who fought on that open headland a 
whole day through and fell together at sunset, 
each slain by the last thrust of the other. But 
we pressed on by carriage, hardly glancing 
at the long, low, stately towered church of 
St. Columb Minor, and cutting short our 
survey of the curious old panels, so richly 
carved with sacred emblems — pelicans, 
crosses, the instruments of the Passion, the 
pierced hand, a heart within a crown of 
thorns, the lamb, the wafer and the cup — in 
the brother church of St. Columb Major. 
From the depths of our Cornish road shut in 
by banks and hedges some ten or twelve feet 
high, we eyed the ripe blackberries hanging 
well above our reach ; we saw a blazing rick 
on one side and, on the other, a maze of white 

363 



CORNWALL 

butterflies circling among the fuchsia trees; 
we met a group of rustic mourners pushing 
a bier set on wheels ; and just as the hedges 
began to open here and there, giving us vistas 
of wheatfield, moor, and sea, we found our- 
selves at Wadebridge, a little town with a 
street of ivy-greened houses dignified by a 
grey church- tower. We crossed a stone 
bridge of many arches that seemed too big 
for its river, and took train for Camelford. 
On our right we had the granite masses of 
Brown Willy and Rough Tor and presently, 
on our left, the great gashes of the Delalobe 
slate quarries. 

These held the close attention of a Cornish 
miner who, after forty years of fortune- seek- 
ing in Australia, was coming home to Camel- 
ford for a visit. He drove up with us in the 
rattling wagonette, gazing on ragged hedge 
and prickly furze as a thirsty soul might gaze 
on Paradise. The fulness of his heart over- 
flowed in little laughters, though the tears 
were glistening on his lashes, and in broken 
words of memory and joy. He kept pointing 
out to us, mere strangers that we were, not 
noting and not caring what we were, the 
stiles and streams and rocks associated with 

364 



CORNWALL 

special events of his boyhood and youth. 
As we went clattering down into the little 
stone huddle of houses, we had to turn away 
from the rapture in his eyes. Brothers and 
sisters were waiting to greet him, with tall 
children of theirs that had been to him but 
names, yet the human welcome could hardly 
penetrate through his dream, through his 
ecstatic communion with the scene itself. 
As we were driving out of Camelford early 
the next morning, we caught sight of our 
grizzled Cornishman once again, standing 
in one of those humble doorways with the 
shining still upon his face. 

A man like that would make anybody 
homesick and, to speak impartially, we 
thought that Camelford was far less worthy 
of such emotion than two villages we sever- 
ally remembered over sea. We fell out of 
humour with the poor old town, would not 
hear of it as the Arthurian Camelot, 

"a city of shadowy palaces 
And stately," 

and disdained the tradition that the blame- 
less king fell at Slaughter Bridge. My ath- 
letic comrade, however, to the admiration of 

365 



CORNWALL 

a flock of little schoolgirls, swung herself 
down the riverbank to see his tombstone and 
reported it as reading : 

Caten hie jacit filius Marconi. 

The drive to Tintagel was through a world 
of slate, — slate everywhere. There were 
slate walls, slate houses, heaps of slate-refuse, 
banks of broken slate feathered with gorse 
and heather, yawning mouths of disused 
slate quarries. We passed through defiles 
where slate was piled cliff- high on either 
side. Slate steps led up to the footpaths that 
ran along the top of the hedge- banks. By 
way of this forsaken region we came to a 
sleeping town. Tintagel Church lay before 
us, hoary, silent. Not a soul was in the 
streets, — not the fierce ghosts of Gorlois 
and of Uther Pendragon, nor the sad ghost 
of Igraine, nor the loving ghosts of Tris- 
tram and Iseult. We left the carriage and 
climbed by slippery paths to Arthur's Castle, 
which is no castle, but a colossal confusion 
of tumbled rocks, some heaped and mortared 
once by human hands, some grouped in the 
fantastic architecture of nature. There we 
sat astonished and dismayed, for the place 

366 



CORNWALL 

is like a robber hold, a den of pirates fortified 
against the land, rather than a court of chiv- 
alry. But the scene was superbly beautiful. 
The ocean on which we looked was a dazzling 
blue, and far to north and south stood out 
the stern, dark outlines of the coast. The 
sunshine that filled the surf with shimmering 
tints gleamed on the white plumage of a gull 
enthroned on the summit rock of the castle, 
— most likely the spirit of Guinevere, for 
Arthur, when he revisits Tintagel, comes as 
the Cornish chough, 

"Talons and beak all red with blood," — 

a bird which no true Cornishman will shoot. 
The monstrous crags and huge fragments of 
old wall were cleft in a fashion strongly sug- 
gestive of 

"casements opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas in fairylands forlorn," 

and we shuddered to imagine with what stu- 
pendous force the terrible tides of winter 
must beat against that naked coast. 

We realised what the fury of the sea- winds 
here must be as we strolled through the 
churchyard, whose slate slabs are buttressed 

367 



CORNWALL 

with masonry and, even so, tip and lean over 
those graves too old for grief. All is ancient 
about Tintagel church, and most of all the 
Norman font whose sculptured faces are 
worn dim and sleepy with innumerable years, 
each year bringing its quota of babies for the 
blessing of the holy water. 

We had to leave it, — the mysterious 
Titanic ruin with its bracken blowing in the 
wind, the sheep, chained in couples, that 
prick their silly noses on nettles and furze, the 
old church, where bells tolled without ringers 
on the day that Arthur fell, the old wayside 
cross, the old stone dovecote in the vicarage 
garden, but not the cliffs and the sea. For 
we drove up the coast to Boscastle, pausing 
on the way — and that was our mistake — 
to see the little church of Forrabury. This 
is the church that longed for a peal of bells 
to rival those of Tintagel, but when the vessel 
that brought the bells was waiting for the tide 
to take her into the harbour, and the pilot was 
thanking God for a fair voyage, the captain 
laughed and swore that it was only their own 
good seamanship they had to praise, where- 
upon a mighty billow, far out at sea, swept 
down upon the ship and overwhelmed her, 

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only the devout pilot escaping with his life. 
And ever since — so ballad and guide-book 
assured us — the tower of Forrabury church 
has stood voiceless, though a muffled knell, 
when a storm is coming up, is heard be- 
neath the waves. What then was our right- 
eous wrath on finding this venerable edifice 
all newly done up in pink frescoes, — yes, 
and with an ornate bell-rope of scarlet twist 
hanging beneath the tower! 

The harbour of Boscastle is a rock- walled 
inlet somewhat resembling that of Pasajes in 
the north of Spain. Curving promontories 
shut in a tidal stream that runs green in the 
sun and purple in the shadow. Swift lines 
of creaming foam glint across where the river 
yields itself up to the strong currents of the 
sea, — a sea which, as we saw it that brilliant 
September afternoon, twinkled with myriad 
points of intolerable light. 

How can the pen cease from writing about 
Cornwall? And yet it must. There is a 
devil — a printer's devil — that counts our 
idle words. I may not tell of wind-swept 
Morwenstow, where Tennyson and Hawker 
roamed the wave-fretted cliffs together and 
talked of the Table Round, nor of lofty 
24 369 



CORNWALL 

Launceston, with its ivied Norman keep and 
great granite church whose outer walls are 
covered with elaborate carving. The sculp- 
tured figure of Mary Magdalen at the east 
end, lying on her face in an attitude of ex- 
treme dejection, is regularly stoned by the 
boys for luck, and flints and shards were 
lodged, when we saw her, all over her poor 
back. I may not tell of Bodwin, either, with 
its memory of a mayor who took a prominent 
part in the West Country revolt against the 
reformed service. As a consequence, when 
the agitation was over he was called upon to 
entertain the royal commissioner, who hanged 
his host after dinner. 

It is a pity not to have space to suggest the 
softer beauties of the south coast. From 
Truro, after a visit to its new cathedral with 
its holy memory of Henry Martyn, we drove 
by way of Sunny Cove to Malpas. The gulls 
were screaming as they sought their dinner on 
the flats, and a man, wading through the pools 
was gathering up belated little fishes in his 
hands. We sailed between wooded banks 
down the Fal to Falmouth, which is watched 
over by the garrisoned castle looming on Pen- 
dennis Head. The old port lies in picturesque 

370 



CORNWALL 

disorder along the inlet, while the new town 
stands handsomely on the height above. 
Here we saw, in lawns and gardens, a semi- 
tropical vegetation, yuccas, acacias, bamboos, 
aloes, palms, and pampas grass. Would 
that there were time to tell the smuggling 
scandals of the Killigrews, that witty and 
graceless family who ought to have learned 
better from their Quaker neighbours, the 
Foxes ! It was by a Killigrew that Falmouth 
was founded in the reign of the first Stuart, 
and Killigrews made merry in Arwenach 
House, and made free with the merchandise 
of foreign ships, for many a pleasant year. 
The time when piracy could be counted an 
aristocratic amusement has gone by in Fal- 
mouth, as well as the bustling days when this 
port was an important packet station whence 
coaches and postchaises went speeding up to 
London. It is now putting on the gentler 
graces and coming into repute as a winter 
resort, though it has not yet attained the 
popularity of Penzance. 

On our way from the one to the other we 
passed through the mining town of Redruth, 
near which, in the hollow known as Gwennap 
Pit, Wesley addressed vast audiences. On one 

371 



CORNWALL 

occasion the number was reckoned as thirty- 
two thousand. "I shall scarce see a larger 
congregation," he wrote, "till we meet in the 
air." The more mystical doctrines of Fox 
took little hold on the rough fishermen and 
miners of Cornwall, but Wesley practically 
converted the Duchy, turning it from the 
most lawless corner of England, a lair of 
smugglers and wreckers, into a sober, well- 
conducted community. As little flames are 
said to be seen playing about a converted 
Cornishman, Wesley's path across the county 
must have been a veritable Milky Way. In 
such natural amphitheatres as Gwennap Pit, 
it may be that the Cornish Miracle Plays, so 
far excelling the English in freedom of fancy 
and symbolic suggestion, were given. We 
looked wistfully from Hayle over to St. Ives, 
with its long line of fishing boats tied up like 
horses to a church fence, but since we could 
follow only one road at once, held on our way 
to Penzance. 

Beautiful for situation, the "Holy Head- 
land" looks out over waters exquisitely 
coloured toward 

"the great Vision of the Guarded Mount," 
372 



CORNWALL 

St. Michael's Mount, a solemn cone, fortress- 
crowned, above which a praying hermit, when 
the setting sun was flooding the skies with 
splendour, might easily have deemed he saw 
the guardian wings of the Archangel. As all 
Cornish children know, this mount was built 
by the giant Cormoran and rose, in those 
days when Mount's Bay was a fertile plain of 
several parishes, from the midst of a forest, 
"a hoare rock in a wood." It was the scene 
of the glorious exploit of Jack the Giant- 
Killer, who was afterwards appointed tutor 
to King Arthur's eldest son in that special 
branch of warfare. Cornwall is so fond of its 
old giants that it sometimes, so folklorists say, 
confuses their deeds with those of the saints. 
But it loves its saints, too, who are said to be 
more numerous than the saints in Paradise. 
Cornish churches stand open all day long, and 
old Cornwall's affectionate name for the 
Virgin was "Aunt Mary." 

The view ranges on across Mount's Bay to 
The Lizard, that peninsula so beautiful with 
its serpentine cliffs and Cornish heath, the 
wildest and loneliest part of all wild and 
lonely Cornwall; but our route lay to its 
companion point on the southwest. Our 

373 



CORNWALL 

driver literally knew every inch of the road 
and pointed out to us cross after cross, and 
cromlech after cromlech, — such vague old 
stones, worn featureless and almost formless, 
built into walls, half sunken under the turf, 
embedded in banks, peering at us from across 
a field, thrusting a grey visage through a 
hedge, — sometimes a mere time- eaten stump, 
sometimes a heathen monolith with the after- 
thought of a crucifix rudely graved upon it, 
sometimes a complete square cross. These 
last we often found in churchyards, set up on 
stone platforms approached by a flight of 
steps. Such was the one we noted in the 
churchyard of St. Buryan, another of those 
long, low, lofty- towered old churches char- 
acteristic of Cornwall. 

As we neared Penberth Cove, the Atlantic 
opened out to view, its sparkling turquoise 
relieved by one white sail. It was in Pen- 
berth Cove that there once lived a bedridden 
old woman, a good old soul, about whose 
one- roomed cottage the Small People, to 
divert her, used to sport all day, catching her 
mice and riding them in and out of holes in 
the thatch, dancing the dust off the rafters 
and giving trapeze and tight-rope perform- 

374 



CORNWALL 

ances on the cobwebs. The valley runs 
green to the sea and we left the carriage for 
a walk across the fields, a walk diversified 
by stiles of all known species, to Treryn 
Castle. This monstrous fastness of heaped 
rock and jagged crag was built by a giant 
who was such a clever necromancer that all 
he had to do was to sit in the Giant's Easy- 
chair, to whose discomfort we can testify, 
and will the castle to rise out of the sea. For 
latter-day necromancy, our guide pointed 
out Porthcurnow Beach, where, he said, six 
submarine cables land. He was a native of 
the coast, a fisherman, and gave us eyes to 
see the gulls rejoicing over their feast of 
pilchards, and ears to hear the whistle of a 
young otter. The Lion of Treryn is the 
Logan Rock, but we first encountered, in our 
scramble over the crags, Lady Logan, a 
stumpy personage whose hood and skirt, 
though recognisable, are of the Stone Age 
fashion. This granite beauty is so sensitive 
in her feelings that she trembles at a touch. 
As we climbed higher among the rocks, in 
the exhilarating air, we won views ever more 
wonderful of rolling green billows shattered 
into clouds of spray upon the shore. The 

375 



CORNWALL 

Logan itself is an enormous rocking- stone, — 
a boulder weighing some seventy tons deli- 
cately balanced on cubical masses of rock. 
It does not, like the rocking-stone in Burma 
on which a little pagoda has been built, os- 
cillate in the wind, but swings at a sturdy 
push. It was formerly more easily swayed 
than now, for a mischievous young Gold- 
smith, nephew of the poet who was himself 
so prankishly inclined, undertook in 1824, 
when commanding a revenue cutter off this 
coast, to dispel the popular notion that no 
human force could dislodge Logan Rock. 
On the eighth of April, though the first 
would have been more appropriate, he landed 
with a crew of eight men, meaning to tip the 
stone over into the sea. But he only suc- 
ceeded in moving it some four feet to the left 
and, even so, found his escapade an expen- 
sive one, for it cost ten thousand dollars to 
replace the ponderous mass — as the anger 
of the people compelled the Admiralty to 
order him to do — on its original pivot. 
With all his efforts, he could not hit the per- 
fect poise, and whereas Logan Rock once 
had the power of healing sick children who 
were rocked upon it, that spell no longer 

376 



CORNWALL 

works. It was not the right hour for us to 
ascertain whether touching the stone thrice 
three times would still make a woman a 
witch. This test should be undertaken at 
midnight, when a battalion of sympathetic 
hags, mounted on stems of ragwort, would 
be hooting encouragement from their fav- 
ourite rendezvous at the towering crag south 
of Logan Rock known as Castle Peak. 

We returned to our carriage and drove on. 
The fields of gorse and heather suddenly 
slipped over foaming reefs and we were at 
Land's End. Great waves were churning 
themselves white against the ledges. A few 
sails glinted on the horizon ; a few gulls were 
perching on the rocks ; but we were, at first, 
aware of nothing save the steep, broken wall 
of granite and the strange, compelling song 
of the Atlantic. By degrees we noted light- 
houses, bays, and a curious cavern, with such 
wave-eaten arches as we had seen at Biar- 
ritz, beneath our very feet. We walked along 
the edge of the cliffs, green with turf to the 
sheer plunge. At places, indeed, the heather 
runs down the rocks to meet the tide. We 
passed close by gulls that stood unstartled 
in this their own domain of crags and spray - 

377 



CORNWALL 

dashed gorges, eyeing severely the approach 
of uninvited guests. 

The sun was setting and we could distin- 
guish the Scilly Isles like gold cloudlets rest- 
ing on the sea. Between these islands and 
Land's End once bloomed the lost Arthurian 
realm of Lyonesse. But weary of the past 
and its dim fables, our hearts followed that 
rippling line of splendour further and further 
west, far out across the Atlantic to the land 
of hope and promise, the strong young land 
that fronts the future, vowed to the great 
adventure of human brotherhood. 



The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A. 

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